From what I understand SketchUp doesn’t utilize but one core. We’re currently hitting a roadblock because an architect has sent us a 900 MB Revit file which is larger than some of the Football Stadium files we’ve work with in the past… It’s ridiculous. Now we’ve converted the file to a DWG but SketchUp is locked up trying to import the file. It’s been running overnight and we split the file into two halves so that we could import it faster and it still isn’t done importing.
This has pushed our designers further and further back because they can’t start on the designs until they have the Sketchup file in hand.
Will SketchUp ever get the ability to utilize more than one core? From what I’ve heard it’s one of the few 3d Modeling programs that doesn’t utilize more than one core…
The opposite is true. As far as I know, there are no multicore modelling applications. Many applications that have a large feature set use multithreading for some tasks, like non-realtime photorealistic rendering, but no one has yet been able to split up a 3D modelling UI into multiple threads to produce performance benefits. It might be impossible.
When the first motherboards supporting multiple Pentium processors were released something like 25 years ago Autodesk promised to release multithreading versions of AutoCad and 3DS Max in no time. We are still waiting. The same is true about Revit - it uses multicore for render but all the modelling happens in a single thread.
900mb in Revit is pretty enormous, and exporting that to any polygon mesh model format (including SketchUp) is going to be rough. I would encourage you to try to slim the model down a bit before exporting it. How large is the DWG file that you exported from Revit?
The DWG is about 68 MB. I’ve gone through and turned off pretty much
everything I could without having to export individual sets (walls,
windows, roofs, etc) as DWG’s. I can usually export it all in one go, with
the ACIS solids option checked and it works. But this is the largest one
I’ve ever dealt with. I’m about to go through with a local, detached
model, and delete sheets, views, pretty much anything and everything that’s
not geometry to try and get the file size back down.
That is still kind of big, but I imagine you’ll be able to process it given time. What kind of project is it? You mentioned doing football stadiums in the past, which I know can be trouble if you are trying to import every individual seat in a model.
Yeah… Normally I can import overnight and set it before I leave for the
day. Usually I can get a 40 MB DWG in over night. I didn’t export the 68
MB and it turns out my coworker included a lot of the furniture in his file
so it was time wasted. I ended up breaking the file up by VG in Revit and
managed to keep everything below 30 MB, most were below 15 MB. My computer
is the fastest in the building and most of those took less than a few
minutes to import. It’s a 5 story Engineering building so the architects
just sent us all they had. Unfortunately the craftsmanship was less than
desirable so we had to do alot of clean up in both Revit and SketchUp.
I’m actually still rebuilding it. I got the file to 63 MB total but a lot
of our Designers run off Macbook Pro’s and now that they’ve textured it and
added a few components of their own they’re running into issues because
there are too many individualized groups.
My computer has really high end components in it so I don’t have any speed
issues, but even the one guy with an iMac is having SketchUp crash issues
consistently. Anyways. I’m almost done copying things into a new file in
order to consolidate some of the 36000 groups in the file and put
everything on Layer 0, etc. So far I’m at 43 MB and I can run it pretty
dang fast. However my computer is a bit OP compared to the other machines
we have. This is the most intensive file we’ve ever received from an
architect. Recently we had a full size collegiate stadium with all the
suites and furniture included and it wasn’t nearly this much of a
headache. I’m on the Technical Design team at Advent, so we’ve been
working on rolling out a Revit program to help integrate with Architects
but it looks like we need to also implement a list of requirements for
models we receive from architects.
I think the usual advice is still the best in most cases. Specific advice depends on what your goals are. If you’re using SketchUp to spruce up a Revit model for rendering, for example, you would want to do different things than if you were planning on using the Revit geometry as a background for a new model in SketchUp for some other purpose.