It’s been a while since I’ve checked the forum. Mostly, I’ve now been busy trying to sell the building, not develop it more, but given that it’s nearly 100 stories high and has 7,250 apts. currently, there are bound to be changes! BTW, I recently figured out that it has a FAR of about 10.5, well below our local NYC cap of 12…but that’s if we’re allowed to include the span across the East River as part of the Area, which current law forbids.
Anyway, I mainly came here b/c I wanted to post a New Topic, but the forum keeps going blank on me when I try to use the Select A Category dropdown. Since it’s been several months since I’ve been here, maybe something has changed on my iMac, the Forum, or both, that’s causing this. Anyone have a clue?
As to my question, it is this: Is there a way to measure load-bearing capacity in SU, perhaps as an add-on, or worst case, as in another program that uses .skp files as the source. John and I made this series of columns that supports the building, but can’t directly measure whether it is sufficient. This submodel is 1,010’ H X 1,998’ across (the outer walls are 1’ thick on each side, making it 2,000’ across exactly):
The full model is currently about 661MB. I recently did a Purge (1/2 hour), which knocked it down from 670MB to 650MB, but then I added some stuff from the 3D warehouse since one major engineering firm is now asking me to come up with how to actually construct the building, which meant deploying a very large barge (the actual Presque Isle from the warehouse), some huge cranes (which had to be scaled and stacked even larger), etc. which all added about 11MB back. (Hey, Engineering Firm(s), I think you might want to check my model before you sink $15B into it and thousands of construction workers…but that’s another story).
Placemaker had previously added about 150MB of that alone, for the dense urban location.
The only thing which makes the model workable is to turn off most layers. Otherwise, it can be painfully slow, too slow really, to manipulate while modifying it, though you can change the view, rotate around etc. This gets easier if you only have to zoom into a small part of the building.
John’s iMac is almost as good as mine but he effectively can’t run it. I’m sure anything equal or less than his will bog down, and laptops are probably all insufficient.