Performance improvements

Echoing comments and sentiments elsewhere on the forum, and not so much a feature request but LO really needs a significant boost in performance when dealing with complex / construction documents. There are no workarounds for this, it makes the use of an application that can produce some of the best looking, detailed, communicative drawings I’ve ever seen, a frustrating and desperate experience, especially late at night when you. are on a deadline (and to be fair, we are always on a deadline!). I am only a one man architectural studio and have the ‘latitude’ to suffer it because of the great (I mean, really, great!) output quality but I could not imagine demonstrating the workflow for a larger studio adoption because of the poor speed in Layout, it simply wouldn’t cut it. SU ‘feels’ fast, Layout ‘Feels’ (and actually is) slow.

How Nick Sonder manages is beyond me, maybe he and his studio see the quality of the output and communication as the ultimate priority as do I, and the pain in getting there is worth it. I don’t want to sacrifice the quality, knowing it is achievable for the sake of speed, Ive tried to find a middle ground but I can’t find one , its either awesome or meh!

On the flip side , LO is kind of a mystery, presenting a 3D model, styledhowever you want it, in sharp vector format seems like magic. I’m OK with the feature set, I can get what I need out of it with some graphical hackery etc although if I had to name a feature I’d like, it would be directional gradient support and the ability to use a gradient as alpha transparency / clipping mask.

thanks for your time.

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Even more than speed, what it really needs is a swift workflow with Sketchup, tools that work as in sketchup and seamless export to CAD.

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I’m very lucky, I don’t have to export to CAD, my output is the final article usually. Although the cad export is a lot better in 2018 than previous versions.

It is better overall, but multiline texts don’t work. I still have to use Layout 2017 for that…

However in LO 2018 all texts can be sent to model space when using CHSPACE autocad command while 2017’s, using that command shrinks down texts that move to model space.

Overall there are still some details like these that makes things hard on us. So, I must agree with many of the criticism LO suffers, but I must also tell you that I have seen progress over time and so I have confidence on LO team.

Same here. Have seen good improvements. If the performance issue can be overcome that would be a huge step forward. Layout has always been the presentation layer - maybe that’s why dwg / dxf import is better than the export? But as usage changes I can se why a compliant CAD output is essential

I don’t need the export to CAD personaly, although I get it, but a better workflow with sketchup would transform my usage of LO. I still don’t understand why viewports are married to scenes, it demands so much more time to manage. Why not just give full control of all display options from within LO?

I don’t mind scenes at all, though I feel most of them wouldnt be needed. Sections and plans are standard so you could draw a line and Layout could generate a section. Right now you need a lot of work to create these scenes and you need two or mor to mask away flaws in the model. If you have multiplanar floor plans or sections you need to have scene for each plan.

I also do mind that scenes are so limited in what they transmit to Layout, that SU layers are not accessible from Layout or exportable to cad as separate layers, and that Sketchup styles can’t be manipulated from Layout, that SU edges cannot become dashed or styled any other way, that swction lines cannot be removed or hidden…

There are so many things in the workflow we need and for which I had to figure out a workaround or ognore altogether…

  • A scene manager where we could at least group scenes
  • a section manager that would help us define sections (multiplanar too) and would help us draft in sections.
  • an edge style manager…

Then tools for drafting as in sketchup we have.

The tools for tagging areas, from Layout polylines, heights, gradients, or simply count objects.

Viewports that scale right, that can be split without duplicating them, that represent true 2d and not heavy 3d scenes that we don’t need to orbit as we are going to work on 2d anyway…

These are altogether missing and make me loose much more time than Layout render speed.

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Agreed, I think we are saying the same thing, give control of camera position, FOV, style, perspective, scale, shadows, layers, everything except geometry right from within LO, don’t make me reopen Sketchup to make changes and resave then update. One should be able to have a model with no scenes at all imported into LO and effectively build “scenes” with all options there inside the viewports. I wish LO referenced the model geometry only and let us manipulate the rest from within, and then made those choices persist through a model reference update. One would only go back to sketchup if one wanted to change the geometry itself, instead of 40 times a day trying to adjust the shadows or a minor tweak to a camera position. That would make LO a more pleasing expierence for me.

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Well, I agree with you but I’m stating the opposite.

You want an alternative method of configuring the current 3D scenes. That would allow us to free Sketchup from a lot of scenes and have that setup inside Layout. Makes sense!

What I want is a different way to deal with the Sketchup model: I want Sketchup to export 2D drawings that look exactly like sketchup scenes. These would then be really fast to use in Layout and solve one of it’s major shortcomings which is obviously viewport regen speed. I have tried to convert my scenes to 2D drawings and send to Layout and they rendered oh so fast. As fast as AutoCAD’s parperspace.

(Creating these 2D scenes envolved exporting DWG from Layout, then import into Sketchup, then generate faces and paint them as a 2D sketchup model and send them back to Layout.)

So, you’re proposing a different workflow to solve scene management. I’m proposing a way to solve speed. They are compatible and I could see myself using both, but they are not the same. Mine would require a new kind of bridge between Sketchup and Layout.

Imagine if there was a multi scene SVG exporter for Sketchup, (or PDF) scenes and if Layout could import those SVG or PDF drawings in vector format instead of viewports. We could then just insert them and work fast. But of course, we wouldn’t need SVG or PDF, we would only need a Sketchup 2D file to work as a bridge.

NOTE: Sorry but I thought I was replying in continuity with this topic here:

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