Looking for help with a Layout file that won’t open. When I open it the wheel just spins for 30 minutes, the file name appears on the tab at the top but nothing loads and I eventually just close the file.
The file opened just fine last week and I exported a PDF then I uploaded the file and PDF to Dropbox for my employer to view it and neither he nor I can now open the file. The back up doesn’t open either.
I am a newbie and not tech savvy so am sure this is operator error but might need some lay person speak to talk me through this.
Is my file recoverable? It’s a week’s worth of work on a client’s design so crossing my fingers.
Your layout file is opening up, but it took longer. The SKP model has 4,000,000 edges and 26 MB, and after using Purge command it reached 18 MB.
For Viewports you could use Raster instead of Vector, and for Styles you could use a Default one instead of Sketchy edges.
It will also help you if you use optimized vegetation models (fewer edges).
Thanks for that! That’s standard for how my office works (vector, sketchy edge styles and vegetation models) but we’re looking into alternatives later in the year when it’s quieter. This is the first time I’ve had an issue like this crop up but it is one of the bigger designs I have done. Just confused as to why it would open last week in less than a minute and now be unable to open, what changed in closing the file the last time?
Greatly appreciate your suggestions, just wondering how I open the file to be able to make these changes… It won’t open even after several hours of the wheel spinning.
I commented to show that I was also able to open your file, and that I saw some reasons for the difficulty being your workflow, which is far from optimal. Spreading things out so far makes navigation difficult and will lead to clipping and some other very odd behavior where the faces and edges move about uncontrollably. Incorrect Tag usage is a significant issue and should be addressed, possibly throughout your office. Adding this all to the somewhat bloated file due to not purging makes for potential problems, not opening for you being one of them.
I didn’t mean it to be rude or dismissive (if you read it that way?), just a quick note that you have things besides what had already been mentioned that need to be addressed.
A layout file is basically a renamed .zip file.
So if you change the file extension to .zip you will be able to open the .skp file. Cleaning that up and then renaming the .zip to .layout might make it open for you.
Tags are a way of assigning an object an on off switch for visibility. You can assign many objects to a Tag, but not many Tags to an object.
You should always leave Untagged active in the Tag dialog and you should only assign a Tag to objects, not to Raw Geometry. So only give tags to Groups, Components, Dimensions.
If you triple click on any geometry in your model and see nothing in the Tag box of Entity info then it means you have edges and faces assigned to multiple tags, rather than untagged.
The main issue with tagging raw geometry is that you can be editing something which is actually modifying something that you can’t see on a hidden Tag. Have you ever got the warning message saying your recent action has cause… gif is better.
See how you get a hole and edges you can’t delete, this way leads to madness. Your model is full of raw geometry that has been tagged, you will find faces with one tag and the edges another.
Thank you, this is helpful and yes that has been an issue which my lecturers have not been able to explain and help resolve. So in my line of work where I need to be able to produce drawings for contractors that for example have the face as one tag for an area of turf or garden bed say but the edges another tag for length of steel edging, how do I resolve that?
Something to keep in mind that may help.
Don’t think of it as making a drawing, you are creating a 3 dimensional object, from which you can get 2d drawings.
So everything you make should have 3 dimensions (ok some things being flat may only need to be 2 dimensions but…) therefore model everything with that in mind. Once you have created a ‘piece’, something that in real life would be an object, make it a group or component. This separates the geometry into movable pieces which you can tag however you wish. So all your various groups of turf can have very specific group names to identify where they are on the site, then they can all be assigned to the Turf tag to turn them on and off all together. Then there are tag folders and so on and so forth.
Again, thing of things rather than a drawing.
If you open a file directly from the zip file it will be Read Only. Extract the contents of the zip file into a folder making sure you maintain the exact file structure with the folders and xml files. Then you can edit the SketchUp file and save it. When you get finished with the editing and save the file, collect all of the contents into a new .zip file. Then rename it to .layout.
I think you’ll need to be very brutal in your cleanup of the SketchUp file. Box pointed out that your model is spread out over a pretty large area. You’ve got one copy of the plan over 650 meters from the rest of the model. That kind of thing isn’t needed and doesn’t help.
I opened the SketchUp file, fixed incorrect tag usage and purged unused stuff from the file. This reduced the file size by about 30%. More could be done in the way of cleaning up the file.
I’ve been continuing to poke at your LayOut file but still unable to get it to open in a reasonable time. I inserted the .skp file (after I fixed the incorrect tag usage and purged unused) into a new LO file and it works very quickly for me. I’m thinking you’ve got some other issue in your file. Maybe other bad references or something else. It might make sense to start fresh with a cleaned SketchUp model file instead of investing more time to make this file work. Check the images in the original file but you can scavenge them out of the original file that you’ve unzipped.
Going back to your original problem, the most likely cause of it taking a long time to open the file is that there are a lot of pages that need thumbnails updating. When the file eventually opens you could do a Save, and the thumbnails will be stored in the file, and it should open quicker next time.
