We are committed to improving your experience in LayOut and understand that performance has been a sore spot for some time. With the 2024.0 release we have reworked the underlying architecture of LayOut as well as introducing an updated graphics engine, changing the way entities are drawn to the page. With these improvements, LayOut will be a more powerful platform moving forward.
We are excited to get this new graphics engine in front of you as soon as possible. With that in mind, we have released the new graphics engine as a SketchUp Labs project. The new graphics engine will be available as an option you can enable in the Performance section of LayOutās Preferences.
While fully functional, this new feature may have some issues that still need to be worked out. Thatās where you come in! Good or bad, we want to hear about your experiences with the new Experimental Graphics Engine and how it is working for you. Tell us about what issues you may be experiencing while modeling, or how much this feature has improved your modeling experience.
Either way, we want to hear how the Experimental Graphics Engine is working for you.
Hi JQL, the new graphics engine as well as other architectural improvements will mainly help drawing entities to the screen space more efficiently. Exporting in this fashion is something we would like to address and are looking into ways to accomplish.
Iāve been working in LayOut this week creating some marketing Collateral and man itās humming! Iām getting a little carried away stacking viewports with different style and tag override settings. Loving this update.
Eric, as always, you truly impress me with your ability to make fantastic visuals with a healthy amount of graphic design and presentation. Terrific work and looking forward to your next Level Up entries!
Trent, I know this is probably more of a feature request more than feedback, but Ericās post got me thinking: is it possible to have blend modes for bitmap/raster objects in LayOut with this new graphics engine? It might give the ability to do a healthy amount more inside of SketchUp and LayOut, rather than other products. Combining stacked viewports with color, material, lines, AO, shadows and tweaking in LayOut is really interesting to me. I know it was sort of hinted at for feedback in another thread, but this brought it back to the front of my mindā¦
Regardless, I am really enjoying this new LayOut release and the team should be proud of their hard work. It shows!
I really like the ability to switch to Draft Mode / hairline view with the shortcut key when dimensioning. I can now see precisely what I am clicking on when lines are in close proximity. Previously I would have to change the scene line width and then change it back before printing.
It would be better if the dashed line types were retained in Draft Mode.
As Iāve mentioned previously, zooming and panning is much better with the experimental engine enabled but it affects the rendering of text boxes and linework shifts slightly and thin line weights are slightly more bold.
Having the the experimental engine enabled does not seem to affect PDF export, i.e. PDF export with the engine off or on appears to be the same ā as expected.
Hi Paul, great to hear and yes you are correct. We are working to solve these remaining āshiftsā before we enable the Experimental as the default. Also, all exports are currently using the legacy graphics engine so as you pointed out, the results will be consistent as when the experimental is disabled.
@dsiro We are exploring ways for this to be achieved as this has proved to be a tough thing to solve.
@DGSketcher I am so glad to hear you are using Draft Mode this in this way. I have found the same to be true if I need to trace a SU model in any way or as you noted adding dimensions. We wanted to optimize the performance in Draft Mode as much as possible and displaying the dashes does take a performance hit. We could look to expose this as an option in the dialog in the future though.
@kyeric great to hear! This would be handy to have additional control within the LO document. Off hand some control comes to mind.
Hue
Saturationā¦
Hue, Lightness and Saturation sliders like they work in SketchUp would be very interesting for images, Trent. Also allowing transparency and blending mode options without sacrificing speed is also worth considering.
I am still a huge advocate for allowing feathering of bitmaps and vector objects. I am big Xara user and am consistently surprised on how many other programs donāt have this somewhat amazingly easy-to-use feature. Plus, they introād it in 2001!
Hi. I have been enjoying the performance improvements with the experimental graphics engine. I have a bug when I change OSX āspacesā and return to my space with layout. The page goes black and just renders the bottom left corner. It does it to all my open Layout windows at once. It doesnāt do it immediatly but if I leave the app for a while. The only way I find of resetting this is if I slightly resize the window with a bottom right drag and it redraws the whole page. Reproducing the problem is erratic and doesnāt happen every time. I havenāt been able to reproduce it with the experimental engine turned off.
Thanks for your hard work. I am very surprised and thrilled to use something that makes producing documents easier. Do you have any benchmarks? For instance, how does performance compare between MacBookPro Intel with Radeon Pro Vega 4 gb versus and MacBookPro M3 or MacBook Air M3? I want to know if I should buy a used older machine with the same specs or a MacBook Air M3 or something more expensive. Thanks again!
