I am trying to build some “Bougainvillea flowers” in different forms. I have each of the few individual flower models in a component. The flower needs to look more dense. Eventually, the SketchUp will become really laggy. I want to manage to arrange the form of these flowers freely without all the laggy and crashing. Is there any advice?
( When I am in orbit mode, the components will become these black line boxes which make the model run smoothly. Could I view these components in black line boxes as I am modeling? And reveal the flower when I am ready to render?)
Will you use them for close-up render or will you have more than one bouga in the model?
You can use 2D images of branches with flowers if you don’t render them close up.
Or you can create components for branches, and inside have only raw geometry for flowers and leaves, but with as few edges as possible.
The only suggestion I can make is to use a 2D face-me image for the whole thing instead of actual geometry for each blossom. That much geometry detail is going to overwhelm SketchUp every time!
quick test: I used the Skatter extension to randomly place about 5,000 leaves and petals over a ‘blobby’ shape. Skatter allows for clustering of flower types by component into zones (ire the white vs purple in your reference image).
Skatter also has a ‘render only’ setting so that if you are rendering with an extension (such as Enscape or V-Ray), then you can by pass SketchUp completely - hence not adding any additional geometry to your model.
Good method, Eric! I still hope that the special Ivy distribution will be implemented in Skatter as soon as possible. Then, the creation of such plants will probably be easier to achieve.
