I have a pretty good laptop for Modelling and Rendering, but it has become very slow with use and I’m in some negociations with my boss for a new one.
I was originally just going to ask for a higher spec laptop, but I’ve also thought about asking for a powerful desktop to work remotely from, when I’m working from home or even in the office. It’s my understanding that you can get a more powerful desktop for the same price of a laptop and that programs like TeamViewer and AnyDesk let you work seamlessly.
Does anyone have experience of this?
For refference, my current laptop specs are-
Processor 13th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i9-13900HX 2.20 GHz
Installed RAM 64.0 GB (63.7 GB usable)
Device ID E8781F24-32A7-4BC7-9522-C474F839A269
Product ID 00330-73769-03558-AAOEM
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Graphics card NVIDIA GeFrorce RTX 4090
They seem great, but my SketchUp crashes an awful lot and it can take 5 to 15 minuites to open projects.
I use SketchUp Pro 2022 and V-Ray 6.2.
Apolgies if this question has been asked 1000 times already.
I don’t know whether those remote desktops will or won’t work, but I am fairly certain that SketchUp does not officially support remote operation. If you run into problems, they won’t help you.
The laptop specs you posted are not terrible, if you are taking 10 min to open a file I suspect your files themselves are the problem, not the computer. How big are your SketchUp files? How many faces/edges, how big are the textures? What kind of display style are you using to render your working screen? No new hardware will compensate for a very bloated model.
The posted specs are faster than my desktop computer. Probably modelling habits are the culprit. Your CPU’s single thread score is less than 15% below the fastest money can buy and your GPU is almost overkill for SketchUp. Hardware solutions won’t bring a noticeable increase in performance.
Are you opening them over the Internet? Don’t! Currently the consensus is that you risk losing your work. If you work remotely, take your files with you.
And copy them from the transfer media to your internal hard drive before editing or saving them. There have also been file corruption issues reported when saving to an external drive.
They vary quite a bit and on average somewhere between 80 to 400MB. As I have to use lots of models that have been converted into SKPs from other formats, the products I have to include can be from 5KB to 30MG, and each project would have multiple products. I’ve tired to just use V-Ray proxies but it makes things difficult to change each slightly as they sometimes need to be customised and tweaked.
I only use textures from the Chaos Cosmos if I can help it and I try to use the lightest edge Style in SketchUp to make sure it all runs as smoothly as possible.
I’m sure there’s more I can do to reduce polys but with the size of the products it feels like an uphill battle!
Sounds like new hardware is not going to solve your problem. It’s very dependent on the edge count and the detail of the textures as well so some other subtle factors so its not as simple as file size alone, but as a general rule 100mb is a very very large SketchUp file. I have some 15mb files with 30m edges that will bring my machine to it’s knees. It would be interesting to see a screenshot of your Model Info > Statistics panel. I also have to work with high poly files imported from other sources and I generally handle it by using minimal textures, and turning off visibility for all edges to keep things moving. But, much above 250mb (which is ridiculously bloated for a SketchUp file) its is very hard to work with. However, if your files are taking so long to load I am curious if you are working over a web connection or are the files stored locally on your drive?
Thanks for your reply,
The specs do seem great on paper and the laptop is only 11 months old, I’m just shocked it’s degraded so much so quickly. I try to only use files I’ve saved locally and even when I open a new SketchUp file it can take a while to open. All I have in my template are some render ready textures I use the most, with only one or two of them having an image texture.
With the high poly items I have to add in, I always have them on a seperate tag to hide them when not needed. I wish I could use more V-Ray Proxies but it creates even more problems unfortunately! Adding items in from the component tray seems to be much speedier than doing so from File/Import.
