Good morning, dear community! We are fine tuning some of our processes and one of them is our use of Layout. We work with rather complex models (round about 90 MB size files) and have split out “Layouting” into multiple files in order to work on these parallel and also for performance reasons.
When I say “Multiple” than I mean something like 30 Layout files / project resulting in some 90-120 PDF-pages of documentation.
All is feed from the same Sketchup-Master-File.
Now. What’s weird is this - if I link this 90 MB Sketchup-File to the Layout-File the Layoutfile ballons to 170 MB - which is about Factor 2. I don’t quite understand this. The viewports take up a couple of MB each, I would understand but the ballooning happens basically right when I create the first viewport.
It almost feels like Layout is still saving the Sketchup-File the same way Sketchup used to save it back before they optimized the file format in Version 2021 (?).
Does somebody have a technical understanding of how the background process of Layout works so we can try to optimize our Sketchup-Input file? I don’t really want to split the Sketchup-File. We tried that but it’s really hard for these type of projects because all data is kinda connected.
Look under document settings in LayOut → References
Probably you’ll have more than one file inserted. Once you have inserted a sketchup file you just have to copy the viewport, it is not necessary to insert it again
The LayOut files (as well as SketchUp files) they are actually zip files. You can rename the “example.layout” to “example.zip” then unzip them, you’ll understand why.
A LayOut file not only contains *.skp model files inside it, but also all linked files with it, such as: dwg, excel, images…
But the main thing make the file size increased is the images those are generated for each SketchUp viewport in your layout file. Their quality and size are controlled by Display Settings that you choosed in the Document settings.
Super-interesting! Ok - check out the screenshot - it would appear that there are only two files in this Layout-document. (I had cleaned up the file before consulting “the Forum”).
If I “open” the document by renaming it to ZIP as @Cyentruk suggested a lot more old crud ist in there after all. You cannot see that from the reference-manager of Layout.
Interestingly enough, if I hit the “delete” button in the reference manager it deletes all the invisible files in the Layout-File.
This feels like a bug…
Ok. File size is down to 90-something MB. I am happy again. Note to self - just hit that “delete” button occasionally and hope for the best.
We are fine tuning some of our processes and one of them is our use of Layout. We work with rather complex models (round about 90 MB size files) and have split out “Layouting” into multiple files in order to work on these parallel and also for performance reasons.
