I am a garden designer and use sketchup for creating visuals. Consequently, my files are made up of plant and tree components that increase edge numbers, file size etc. I have purged and checked for hidden geometry. I turn off layers which are not in a scene, but the software is still struggling when shadows are switched on. I am using a Predator 10th gen i7 nvidia g force and have specified the graphics card to the software. Do I really have to find an even bigger spec to operate this software?! Any ideas. When switching on shadows it can crash out completely.
Is SketchUp crashing as in closing or is it just not responding for a little bit? What you describe sounds like your model is severely taxing your graphics card. Plant components typically have immense entity counts and consequently shadows are a huge drain.
You say you have an Nvidia G force card. What model? (And please put that in your profile. “a good one” is not a suitable answer.) Are you sure it is being used to display SketchUp? Are its drivers up to date? Check with Nvidia to see.
Hi there.
Thanks for quick response. A bit of both; sometimes takes a long time, sometimes shuts down the software. The card spec is Nvidia Geforce 2060.
Did you check the Nvidia control panel to see if it is being used to display SketchUp? Have you checked with Nvidia recently to see if they have a driver update available?
Keep in mind that plant components can be very obese in terms of entity counts. Lots of faces mean lots of work for your graphics card. If you need shadows turned on, save it for your image exports. Shadows coupled with orbiting or otherwise moving the camera greatly increases the work the GPU has to do. You might also check the style. Make sure you are using a “fast” style. Typically with Profiles turned off.
Are you exporting images from SketchUp with shadows? I’m wondering if there might be an alternative process that would work better in your case.
Hi.
I’ll check the driver for updates. I could export the shadows as a layer separately by turning off all other layers and then exporting the same scene without shadows into photoshop…but I don’t have photoshop. I normally just export the scene with shadows as a jpeg to place into a presentation.
I was thinking about the possibility of combining image exports. I often do that not because ofgraphics card problems but so I can manipulate the shadows independently from the rest of the image. I use a freeware image editor called PaintDotNet which I like better than PhotoShop. It opens much faster and has all the power I need.
If you want to try setting up and combining image exports I could give you directions as to how I do it.