New to the board, I searched but really only found Mac vs PC discussions.
I wanted to see if there were any opinions or known issues around sharing files back and forth between platforms. We use Macs for the majority of our design work, but our models are starting to get pretty complex and wanted to buy a higher end PC dedicated to crunching the renders and then moving them back to the mac. How well do the .skp files move back and forth between platforms - any known errors, or issues, is this a bad idea?
The file format itself is completely portable. But John is right that there can be errors if you use a resource such as a font that isn’t installed on both systems.
Don’t call it conversion, call it transfer. There is a single file format (but SketchUp has a new one with every year).
The file format is the same, but different operating systems format disks with different file systems and cannot easily directly access files from the other (apart from file sharing servers or external drives with a more universal file system).
Actually if you don’t plan to edit the models on the Windows operating system, the files are not modified and you don’t need to move them back. Some (external) renderers export the model to their own file format and you even could transfer that instead of .skp (in Hollywood they send theses renderer files to powerful rendering servers on which SketchUp wouldn’t even run).
Issues between different systems (be it same of different OS) happen when files have external dependencies to their environment: references to font names that are not installed on the other system, file paths referencing external files or programs that may have been added by some SketchUp extensions. Materials also save the original absolute image path in the model, but this has no consequences because the texture is also embedded (except it leaks personal information about the folder structure and OS to a third-party that receives the skp file).