Layout too slow to use

The question here for me and I appreciate your honesty @adam, which that kind of honesty out of a company is what I think people are looking for. The problem I think is how long does the excuse last for where the layout and sketchup team are “trying there best” but trying there best means years down teh road we have to wait for some features which are seemingly easy to impliment. I’m not a developer and I’m sure some things are more complicated than they seem, but I think the overall problem here is that production is at a snails pace each year with layout and sketchup and I wonder how long that will go on for, especially when sketchup and layout are arguably (with the plugins) the best programs to use for construction design, we need production speed too, not just were trying our best.

I really don’t want to wait years for something a lot of users are asking for, each year I look at the updates and it’s like wow, what a slow painful process.

2 Likes

I’ve been using SketchUp and Layout for over 5 years. Generally the projects we work on are extensive and very large using multiple CAD programs like Revit and Autocad. We use SketchUp as a part of our tool suite to enable us to do things the other applications wont. When it comes to Layout, it’s a huge bottleneck in our workflow in regards to being able to take our work in Sketchup and drop it on a titleblock. Using all the work arounds and tips to speed up Layout generally only have minimal effects for usability.

Every single time i have to use LayOut i find myself diving back in to these forums for the most part just to read how much everyone else is struggling… for the most part just to make myself feel better.

Basically, it doesn’t matter what you do. If you have a large sketchup file you can expect to spend at least half your time in layout waiting for the viewports to update.

I’s not a hardware issue either. I’ve been upgrading my systems since the day i started using Sketchup. Currently on a Ryzen 7, 32gb ram with RTX 2060.

Layout is way behind the ball in comparison to every other layout program i have used (Revit, Autocad, Solidworks, Illustrator).

I really hope they can figure it out at some point. It’s soo frustrating since SketchUp is such a useful program in our tool suite.

5 Likes

Wow Ian, very well put!
Unfortunately, yours is a very familiar set of complaints … Reading your comments, It struck me that Trimble’s continued lack of serious investment and commitment to LayOut could (if continued) develop into the leak that sinks the ship. Yes, SketchUp is great, but it needs an EQUALLY robust partner (LayOut) to really put the (production deliverables) rubber on the road. Why can’t Trimble see how they are shooting themselves in the foot by not vigerously rounding out their software suite to be something that could truly lead the industry?
Can’t they see the great potential?

2 Likes

Same here. I’m writing from a company that designs and makes/installs art installations and architectural structures.

I have spent the last 3 weeks almost in tears, staring at a spinning wheel in layout, with a project that should have taken a few days.

The project is one of our biggest yet, for a prestigious client, and now I am behind on my presentations and extremely stressed because of the bottleneck that LO is causing.

At least if you could load multiple instances of LO you could set one rendering while working on the other.

But like previous posters have said - we shouldn’t have to ‘trick’ LO in to working for us. It should just be slick anyway.

I’m so disappointed. I love SU - have been using it for well over a decade. But what’s the point of a nice fast modeller when you can’t present what you’ve worked on?

BTW it’s not my machine - all other cad programs, Rhino, Solidworks, etc. work fine.

Didn’t used to be a problem when my company used to make furniture and medium size fit-outs - now we’re moving in to small-scale architecture and LO just does not cut it.

Don’t tell me to only render at the last minute because if the viewport is set to raster the dimension tool can’t find nodes accurately.

Does anyone have any advice of alternative programs to the Trimble offering? I use Solidworks for designing components to be fabricated by subcontractors but it’s not great for architectural.

Rhino is a good option but I can’t model quite as intuitively and quickly as i do with sketchup and I can’t get used to how the camera orbits!

I didn’t think I could afford revit but given the 2 weeks I’ve just wasted that would have paid for LT outright. Can anyone advise on the modelling experience?

Given the last few weeks with LO I am more than happy to take our money elsewhere (we have a few seats).

Sorry for the rant. I’m actually a very positive person - layout just broke me.

2 Likes

Currently trying to edit a vector viewport in LO. It’s a 2700kb sketchup model. Takes about 25 mins to refresh.

I’m using an AMD Ryzen 5 3500X 6-core

GPU is GeForce GTX 960

On the SIMPLEST of models:

share the file…

Share the file. I would guess that despite the small file size your model has a zillion edges and faces as to me it seems that you have modelled the perforated metal seat with a zillion holes. I would use a texture instead.

1 Like

OK here you go (i’ve added a couple of benches since preparing that LO file so it’s grown a bit)

this is NOT the big project I was on about in my last post BTW.

Yeah comment about material/texture is sort of valid although that option doesn’t cut it for some of the visuals I have to prepare with closeups of details and the like.

Point is - this sort of stuff is fine in other programs and I can whizz around in sketchup with shadows on or whatever and it’s as fast as i need it to be.

Then as soon as I go to LO everything slows down to a point I can’t get any work done.

NE2164-Y-01-D-00-SwingBench.layout (5.7 MB)
Porch3.skp (5.9 MB)

The Layout file is super whizzy with me

Works pretty well for me too with my ancient win7 machine and a dodgy mouse.
I duplicated a page and moved it around and it changes pages no problem, zooms in and out etc
What actual issues are you having with it?

There is a problem I’ve tried to get some attention, where it can take a very long time for LayOut to create the page thumbnails. The issue seems to happen with specific models, but it hasn’t been easy to find an example to test on. Your model might do nicely.

What will happen is that when you make a change that affects the model, and indirectly the page image, the thumbnail has to be recreated. My worse case test took about 10 hours to open a file on Windows, because it had a lot of pages, and all of the thumbnails needed updating. Even if the thumbnail could be updated in 10 seconds, it could easily be annoying.

What may be special about your file is that the holes in the benches are geometry. There are over a million edges in the model, and that could be what takes LayOut time to cope with.

So, I made a version where I did the holes with a texture instead. This version has only 46k edges instead of a million. See if working with this feels any better.

porchtest.zip (10.0 MB)

I would model the closeup parts separately.
BTW, it is none of my business, but Google might be a bit aggressive about using their StreetView images.

@box and @PaulMcAlenan The issue is mainly when I try to convert from raster to vector, or resize a vector viewport.

Do you have the same issue?

Yes! On the bench elevation…

But surely it’s to do with the insane (?) number of edges and faces of the perforated seat as @Anssi suggests…?

Hi Colin - thanks for helping. This is way quicker yes.

So it just means that LO can’t handle professional-level designs, only basic forms or sub-assemblies.

A lot of my models have final fabrication-ready info in (laser-cut pathc, CNC paths etc.,) so i can’t really do without them.

Maybe not the file I shared but I need a program that can handle this. I guess SU / LO isn’t it

And you’ve got three of those benches in the SU model so Layout is having to render those other two!

thanks for the modelling tip.

otherwise you’re right - it is none of your business, is not helpful, and off topic!

And then you’ve got some duplication…

So is the consensus that I am trying to use a model that is too complex? If I want to be working with a file such as this, then I am using the wrong software?

There is an architecture practice next door to me, my machine is higher spec than their average.

They all work on Revit models with much more geometry than this without constantly banging their heads against the wall. Is that a sign?

Try this out - it’s the model I was referring to with has been causing the most pain. Is this just too much for LO? Such a shame because Sketchup deals with it no problem! Granted it takes a while to load but once I’m there it’s pretty good!

yeah but the point is I need to handle this and more. I don’t want to be on the edge of the software’s capabilities with 3 benches and a few overlaps!