I have been building a model over several weeks, being a little haphazard in my choice of “grouping” elements and using layers. I started a process this morning of creating new layers, selecting a number of elements, applying a layer to those elements, then turning the layer off so they’re out of the way. My idea was that I would then turn a few layers on at a time and group those items together as well.
The trouble is that sometime after I got done applying layers to everything and turning off all the layers, now everything in those layers is gone. When I turn the layers back on – one at a time or all at once – there’s nothing there.
I hope all is not lost, but I can’t find how to get things back.
First of all, what version of SketchUp are you really using??
Your forum profile says you’re using “Free plan” but SketchUp Free doesn’t use layers. They are called Tags for a number of years now.
The information in your forum profile is important for us to give you the correct answer!!
As for your question, it is often easiest if you share your model as there could be a number of reasons for your problem.
To get your SketchUp version, simply start SketchUp and then look in the upper left of the screen.
You shall see Untitled - SketchUp Pro YYYY where YYYY is the version number like 2024 or whatever.
I loaded your file and was able to see all of it. I resaved it.
It is large with more than 1.1 millions edges and more that 700 000 faces. It took a few seconds for the model to appear on my Macbook Pro 2017. Then I simply moved it to the axis origin although it was not that far from the origin.
It loads about 15 seconds (that’s a 75 Megs file) and orbit, pan and zoom fluidly. This is on a 7 years old computer. I used SU 2022 and 2024 for my tests. I am using my internal SSD drive for this.
Thank you for responding. I am using the Free version. My apologies for using the term “layers”. I had not realized that SketchUp had kept layers as a thing distinct from “tags”.
I tried uploading the skp file, but I was blocked because it’s too large, which is why I linked the DropBox file.
I regret that I’m unable to get to a page like you describe. Would it look different to that if one uses the free version, as I do?
In the meantime, I was able to use your description to relocate my model. I don’t know how I zoomed out that far all at once, but everything is fixed. Thank you so much!
That’s great advice, thank you! Can I ask you to clarify what you mean by incorrect tag usage? Most of the tags are ones I deliberately chose, and then there are a handful that showed up while I was working.
Also: how were you able to perform the cleanup? Is that a utility available to a free user, by any chance?
ALL edges and faces should be created and remain untagged. Only groups and components should be given tags.
Perhaps you got components from the 3D Warehouse that already included incorrect tag usage.
The tag fixing and the cleanup were done with extensions in the desktop version. The web version doesn’t have any facility to use extensions. You could do these things manually although it would be tedious. Again, for your hobby it would be better to choose simpler, lower-poly objects from the Warehouse. There’s generally less cleanup required. There’s also a file size limit for SketchUp Free so you want to keep things simple.
BTW, Layers is a 2D thing which SketchUp doesn’t use. Tags are used to control the visibility of groups and components in the model.
