Good morning. This initial post is likely to be in-depth and detailed (hence a bit long). I feel to do it this way, so that the reader and the larger SketchUp community can hopefully feel my experience. Primarily to assist with potential solutions but secondarily to perhaps spur Trimble into some targeted action regarding Layout.
Before proceeding with my story it’s perhaps helpful to know that I have an i7 machine with 16gb ram and 2gb dedicated NVidia graphics cards. An old machine but still quite effective I think. Running SketchUp 2019.
I am attempting to enroll into tertiary education once again (17 years since my last stint there) and upgrade to an honours qualification in architecture, as a stepping stone to Masters. This past Saturday the applicants were given an entrance assessment and 8 hours to complete it, with a strict 16:30 deadline. Without any consideration for alternatives I implemented the tools I love and know - primarily SketchUp.
Without wasting too much time on the details of the brief, I realised that the roof form would require a good portion of the time allotment after an initial site assessment. Having confidence that my workflow would not disappoint, I threw myself into the design and gave a large proportion of time to the roof design as it demanded. The live rendering package that I use was AMAZING and really showed it’s value under a deadline. Even with multiple iterations of the design being refreshed, I still only needed about 20min to get a decent conceptual 3D perspective. Fit for purpose in my opinion (see image attached).
At 3pm, still confident in my workflow, I realised I had to start compiling my presentation, which perhaps was not enough to really give it a great graphic feel BUT should have been more than enough to prepare at least a decent presentation. Enter Layout.
Inserting the SketchUp model took about 20 seconds. “Ok, there are a fair amount of faces and edges, be patient.” Change to the required, preset (in SketchUp) view…another 60 seconds. Change from Raster to Vector…another 2min. Now for the other 4 pages that are required. Repeat process - lose +30min. Using the native tools in Layout - text, dimensions, symbols had no problem, except now I have 30min to my deadline because of all the multiple 60 seconds and 2min of lag on certain commands. To conclude I manage to click send on my (pre prepared) email at 16:31. (I’m not sure if I will penalised for 1 minute). However I certainly won’t have a great review of my final presentation which essentially was some sketches slapped onto paper with a couple of key notes…very poor in my opinion. Instead of using the remaining time to work on a presentation that might be somewhat decent, I spent most of that time fighting with software that is grossly inefficient.
FIRSTLY - I know @Sonder has some great material for setting up layout templates but is there any basic settings in Layout, that one can fiddle with, to begin with the most efficient Layout? For example, instead of loading with ‘raster’ as the default option can one setup Layout to open with using ‘vector’ as the default? (Seems to me that Vector is more efficient). Any other initial settings that can be set at program level that will assist with efficiency?
SECONDLY - with reference to this post Layout too slow to use efficiently (not being the only one of course),*when will SketchUp actually create a version of Layout without all the lag? Even if I had created a default efficient template (my bad for not having one), I would still want the flexibility to change those defaults and efficiencies on-the-fly without having to wait 2min per mouse click.
