I am building a scene for a restaurant, size of 11000 square feet, and I ended up with more than 6 million faces, my pc is lagging so much that I can’t effectively work anymore. Is this an issue of my laptop not having enough power or is my scene too large, or my face count is just incredibly poor?
I can’t really show my work here, but when I drag or rotate my scene around, all of the objects first turn into box-shaped boundaries, then they took some time to turn into a detailed shape, then they take extra time to load up their textures.
In 3D Warehouse, look for low-poly models or even better create them yourself as light as possible, taking into account the way you will use them and the number of copies.
Use tags and turn off them when they are not useful in a certain scene (especially when you model something that is not directly related to those objects).
Keep in mind when modelling that you have a budget, that budget includes every edge or face in the model, and textures, and things you have deleted but not purged from the model.
The size of your budget depends pretty much on the spec of your computer, but safe to say if it is lagging significantly you have blown the budget.
Things to avoid, overly detailed items, this can be as simple as circles/cylinders or arc with more segments than necessary for for the level of detail you need. 24 is the default, sometimes you may only need six but something you have downloaded from the warehouse has 96.
Things with stuff inside them. This is often the case with kitchen appliances, ovens and fridges etc that even have threaded screws in them, when all you may need is a box with a handle and a bit of a texture.
Speaking of textures, huge images used as textures, utterly pointless.
I could go on but those are the most basic offenders.
If you haven’t purged your file you should do it, on the styles tray edit the styles you’re using and disable the profiles of you have them enabled. There’s a plugin called material resister, install it and check the textures on your model, some models from the warehouse have ridiculously big textures, resize all the big textures. If after doing that the viewport is still laggy, check the models you’ve downloaded and delete the ones with unnecessary detail, download low poly models or create low poly assets as you were advised by mihai, create a tag called assets or whatever name you want and put all the assets on this tag, hide it if you don’t need them for modeling other things.
You can share your file using Dropbox, wetransfer or any platform you prefer to help you checking what’s causing the lag in your model and solve the problems.