There are obviously issues with Layout because so many posters make adverse comments, although it appears to be mac users in the main who complain. Plenty of users on the other hand do good work and think Layout is the bees’ knees, me included, so I wonder if it’s just a case of knowing its limitations.
Obviously, Layout is capable of producing simple plans but incapable of drawing up a 100-floor skyscraper. I wonder where the cut-off point is?
Ditto @PaulMcAlenan and @kevin58, I use LO almost every day for stretches of time, no particular issues. I have completed a 125 sheet set, including Structural, MEP and Civil, all in LO in Windows. As noted, a process of managing one’s resources and expectations. Of course, I would like to see performance improvements, user enhancements/automation, a UI update and improved interoperability with *.dwg (noted LO23 added feature, thank you). Cheers to the LO team and looking forward to the future.
Hi,did you change something in Nvidia that made LO work better?
I’ve been having so much trouble with the LO performance…I like to set the resolution to the maximum since I have a powerful computer. I just lost a big file that it took me weeks to finish and now it keeps loading forever when I try to open…I really wish Trimble could make efforts to improve the overall performance of LO and SKP. When it was from Google it was so much better, unfortunately.
I expect your trouble can be traced back to your messy SketchUp models. If they were made properly as you’ve been advised, you would not see the issues you are having.
No. You are wrong about that. The performance of SketchUp and LayOut are much better now than they were under Google.
Its not messy anymore. Its a new and simple file.
Share the LayOut file.
layout modulos restaurante ruy ohtaki BSB.skp (1.3 MB) Here I have only the skp file, where do I find the layout file, since I dint saved it yet?
Don’t give me wrong DaveR, I love sketchup, we all love Sketchup but I think it could make a lot more with only a few and small investments.
You wouldn’t have a LayOut file if you didn’t save one.
Where do I find the autosave untitled ones?
Automatic down-sampling of imported images (or manual setting of resolution per image as a menu or right click option) would be fantastic and super useful. I like to include real world photos in my docs and they become frustratingly slow.
While I’m at it I’ll mention again (sigh) my desire for the addition of a “display as raster-output as vector” option to the viewport settings. or a “change all viewports to vector “ setting or option to globally output an entire document with viewports rendered as vector. I, like many others, manage the performance limitations of layout in large docs by keeping all viewports set to raster. But this is not acceptable for output and when it’s time to export to PDF every viewport must be changed individually and then changed back after so that work can continue. It takes hours. I understand that “render all as vector” would take the same amount of time, but I would not have to be there, I could push the button and go do other things, as we do when outputting a large render set or video from Twinmotion, and ideally the viewport settings would be unchanged, so no need to loose all the time setting every viewport back to raster so I can continue working.
I don’t mind Layout taking a long time to render, I just don’t want it to take my time.
Thanks!
Not sure if this is really relevant to your idea (i love the idea though) - would it be possible to get an export option to export all viewports as vectors?
One performance thing i notice daily above large images is a SketchUp viewport with complex geometry, takes ages to render as a vector (especially painful when you need to make multiple changes to the viewport, or go between pages of a 10+ page doc that has a viewport on every page.)
Considering the significant difference between that and a quick raster render, I like to make edits as a raster and change to vector as a final output. I think it would be handy to get a option to automatically do this at export-to-pdf.
Thanks
turd 
Would be great to get some sort of control panel for viewports per sheet, like an outliner. Then you can set your display to raster (high medium or low) and control the export per the control panel - but this would require a re-thinking of how viewports are handled, each one needed some sort of naming convention so that you could make sense of them all…
And, back to general performance - there are plenty of page layout applications that manage to handle vector and raster images with text just fine (Illustrator, InDesign, Affinity Designer, etc.).
Somedays I feel like working with QuarkXpress on a quadra Mac (back in the 90s, while writing everything to Bernoulli drives for the press) was faster than working on a single sheet in LayOut.
Today I switched videocards. I bought a RTX 4090 and I must say that I noticed some speed upgrade. 
Agreed…its been a request for years to have some more buttons that adjust rendering at the output stage, or render as a background process (ideally utilising multiple cpu cores).
I also like the idea of rendering Layers differently.
It might all be moot if Hybrid and Vector were sped up…not sure what the potential there is.
Even Illusrrator and Autocad struggle with complex vector images (they simplify or redraw geometry to get around the speed issue).
We’ve also requested a higher resolution raster output option. It would make a large file size but could be a good solution, particularly when complex models are used and Vector or Hybrid dont render properly (eg there’s a transparent material, conflicting/stacked edges, or sketchup text).
I would have thought by now that rendering using multiple cpu cores should also be possible.
Same here too… Entertainment industry. I keep using SketchUp for design and modeling and Vectorworks is my 2D software. I’m now thinking about phase II of my transition and go fully Vectorworks 3D+2D. This is far to be done yet because SketchUp still stand out for 3D modeling. I just wish Layout would be more like Vectorworks and Vectorworks more like SketchUp.
Well said. Recently I tried moving a SU model into vectorworks. Mostly OK until I tried to make alternate views and it brought vectorworks to its knees - first time my mac reported, or vectorworks that I was out of memory.
I don’t know why but sometimes when I export from layout to dwg. with the export to the model everything unchecked, the program crashes, it’s not a file problem, cause I’ve tested several times with the same file and around 70% of the times the program crashes before completing the task. Is this a bug that the developers are aware of? I’ve sent various bugsplat reports. I hope it could be fixed with an update in the near future.
I like the idea of having an outliner, I think it should also mean you can change the style/tags/scales etc without actually having to navigate across pages and wait for them to load. Also, having some sort of “apply all” or “apply selected” feature would be nice.
While I’m dreaming I’d love to see a show/hide option added to the pages tray where hiding a page would affect autotext. For example, a 20 page template, you can hide pages and export only the ones you’d need.
I found you can adjust the raster viewport quality (before export) by lowering the display resolution in the settings.