I need assistance in cleaning up big models

Extensions
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I am working with a contractor who:

• does “Rights of Lights”.
• They receive SU models from various Architectural firms to be analysed.
• They don’t really model anything, they mainly clean-up projects and prepare them for the rest of the process.
• They work on very big models. Sometimes up to 20 000 buildings including site co-ordination and topography. Files sizes go up to 400Mb. :weary:
• The SU models will then go into AutoCAD to do their analysis. They use a plugin for this.

All they want is the shell of the building. The deletion process takes very long.They need help with the workflow as some SU models are not layered, grouped, blocked up correctly. They find the process very time consuming and convoluted.

Import/Export time and file size needs to be reduced.

My Suggestion:

  • “Clean Up” the whole model first. (extension)
  • Use “Selection Toys” and “Select All Instances” to delete unwanted components and geometery.
  • Run another clean up.
  • “Weld” any broken edges. “Soften / Smooth” faces to get the poly count down.

Is there anything else that they can do? Are there any extensions that can offer assistance here? :confused:

Thanks

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• “Window > Model Information > Statistics > Purge Unused”
• show everything (unhide objects / switch on all layers), select all and copy & paste to a new document
• Extension Warehouse : CleanUp³
• SketchUp Help Center : Improving Performance
• fastest CPU avail. (single core performance) w/ 16 GB RAM and preferrably a SSD

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Often photo textures are major contributors to large model size, if you create a collection of the model textures the save file will then report the size of each and you can check the large ones to possibly reduce.;
Quadratic edge collapse decimation can be used to reduce geo don’t think smoothing will help significantly;
Ambient occlusion can also be used to remove geo from inside models;
Rendering is major contributor to slowness so use of layers is must to try to keep speed up, turning off transparency helps plus setting opacity low; use scenes to set up cases where in you can quickly translate to points in your model
I have not keep a close tabs on extensions so have no info on them for some of the above suggestions.

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