I am drawing a large intricate model with a lot of components (80+ now and more to come). I am drawing the components individually and putting them all together in one model. As I add more components, sketchup moves slowly and jerky and if I try to zoom or orbit on the model some of the components disappear until the mouse is released and then re-appear. Is this a sketchuo problem or a computer problem? I have saved everything but I have spent a lot of time placing parts and I am afraid it will crash and lose it all.
What is the file size?
-Gully
I think it says 20.8 mb. The problem gets worse as I add components.
No doubt.
The sad fact is, you can’t just keep adding stuff and adding stuff indefinitely. Depending to some extent on your sytstem (about which you’ve told us nothing) and the kinds of things you are doing, your 20Mb is probably about at the limit of usable size, although I’ve heard people report using much larger models. As you may expect, though, these people weren’t posting to boast about their models’ snappy performance. Some operations may take a half hour to complete; others, you may as well go to bed and check on it in the morning.
The best you can do is to be sensitive to the size impact on your model of everything you do every time you do anything. Use fewer curve segments; use smaller images; take adavantage of components; don’t just import any old component into your model until you are assured it is just as tightly modeled as if you had done it; purge fequently; and on and on.
There’s not one solution, and some people can tolerate sluggish performance more than others. There are really just a bunch of best practices and a continuous effort to use them to model efficiently. Read the following:
How do I make SketchUp run faster?
-Gully
Thanks for the advice. I was not complaining about the speed (or anything about sketchup), I just didn’t want to lose all the things I have spent weeks drawing. The model I am trying to draw is a HUGE stripping shovel (earth moving machine) and it is full size so I cannot do a smaller version or do much to save space. I will just do what I can and enjoy that. Thank You Gully
Well, as long as you’ve got all the components saved separately, it sounds like the risk of losing everything in one catastrophic episode is not great. Now if you also take care to use both the timed and incremental backups and save after every major operation, it’s hard to see how you could lose much, especially if things have been acting pretty stable so far.
-Gully
I am the surprised you having problem at 21 MB. Most of my models are between 100 and 300 MB without any textures. I have no problem. I get a slowdown only when the ‘Edge’ = True or moving large object around.
My limit on my computer for models is about 400 MB. I build a model the other day at 400 MB without textures and it was unusable.