Layout crashes when using draw tools and scrapbook

My problem is maybe two.

  1. I can use the scrapbook as long as I just want arrows and colors. Everything else causes the program to crash. For example: If I choose “signs”, the program either shuts down or the preview box is just white. If I, on the other hand, want to draw up some arrows there are no problems at all.

  2. Draw tools. I can draw the rectangle but everything else causes an error. I have noticed one thing though. If I draw lines, circles , triangles and so forth, the program crashes but a saved copy is made. When I open Layout again this saved copy shows as a preview and the programs asks if I want to open it. In this preview I can se all of the lines, circles and trianlges but the the file opens, none of it shows.

Very greatfull for thoughts and answers

Graphics card is the first thing I’d check. The topic is confusing but basically SketchUp needs as much horsepower in the Graphics area as it can get. I haven’t seen a machine for sale for less than $1500 or so, that is good enough. There is a Hardware Requirement in the Readme file but it’s the minimum. Like today’s building code, it’s not good enough when the going gets tough. I’m running a $350 HP Pavilion 17" (refurbished) from WalMart online. Intel i5-4210 with onboard Intel Graphics processor. It’s a bad setup mostly because the quad core processor is good, but too slow and the ‘integrated’ GPU (with the CPU) is at it’s design limits. None the less, I upgraded the RAM to 12 GB and switched out the 1 TB Hard Disk Drive, for a 250 GB Solid State Drive. ($75) I could use the brand new but now removed HDD for a backup storage device, but I have a Seagate peripheral drive for that already. Windows ‘History’ (Back up software) backs up everything, every hour. It takes a minute or less, sometimes you don’t notice when it’s running.
I turn off everything that isn’t necessary always. Goto 3D Warehouse, get what you want then close the browser etc…
Sometimes I have problems similar to what you mention. Wait. Youtube has all the videos for the changes, but it’s tricky.
Or go get the latest Eurocom ($2500) it’s loaded. It’s Virtual Reality ready and the main components like RAM, CPU, GPU, and Storage are all accessible and swapable without taking it apart. Yes, the CPU too.

Not quite. SketchUp needs your graphics driver to fully support OpenGL. Today it seems that it restricts you to Nvidia-based cards. The card performance is of somewhat secondary importance. Zooming and orbiting speed is limited also by the need to process the vector graphics part of the process by your CPU and what your GPU does is mostly concerned by the rasterizing, textures and shadows. I have successfully used SketchUp with an old laptop that had a 128 Mb Nvidia card. Currently my desktop has an old Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 card with 768 Mb of memory and my laptop “puny” Geforce 620M graphics, and both run SketchUp without problems. A “medium-range” Nvidia GeForce card is usually quite enough, and upgrading that to an ultracool whizbang gaming card will produce no noticeable increase in performance.

Investing in a high-performance CPU with a fast clock rate will give more. 3D modelling is a single-thread process so the number of cores is only important if you use, for instance, third party rendering applications as most of these are multithreaded.

Anssi

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This is the system I´m running Layout on:

Processor: Intel Core i7-3632QM
CPU@ 2.20 GHz (8CPUs)
8192 MB RAM

DirectX version 11.2

Graphic Card: Intel Graphics 4020
Intel Graphics Family

Memory: 1792 MB.

Intel graphics are usually not quite enough for SketchUp to work well. You could try, in SketchUp, going to Window menu>Preferences>OpenGL and turning off Hardware Acceleration (the setting applies for both SketchUp and LayOut). If you can you might retrofit a graphics card into your computer (it is seldom possible for laptops).

Anssi

I´ve tried doing what you suggested but still the same problem. As you say, this graphic card is not quite enough. I´m guessing that I have to look for another computor in order to get it to work right.