I am a junior high graphic art teacher and am in the middle of teacher SketchUp for Schools during remote learning. I have a student who began using SketchUp on an Ipad during our recent project. She was able to build a substantial amount of a model over 2 days but has recently had trouble with the functionality of SketchUp on the Ipad. While she can access SketchUp for schools and use the software, and select tools, she can’t do things like use the pencil or shape tools to build. Her ability to use the zoom and orbit tools is also very limited. Is there a known remedy for this issue or something I can instruct the student to do other than to shut down or restart the app and tablet?
I suspect she’s gotten the file to be rather large and detailed which is taxing the iPad’s CPU and graphics. One thing she could try is purging unused components and materials to see if that reduces the file size enough to make it workable. Have her open the Components panel first, click on the house icon to make sure she’s looking at In Model components and then click on the Purge Unused button at the bottom. It looks like the recycle symbol. Then do the same for materials. Components have to be purged first or you don’t get rid of all of the unused materials.
Another thing she could try is changing the style to a monochrome style so the iPad’s graphics don’t have to work so hard. It’s not as much fun to look at that way but it is a big help with performance. Have her open the Styles panel and choose from the Default Styles. Actually, it wouldn’t hurt to have her purge unused styles after she selects the monochrome style.
Could you expand a bit on what happens when she tries to do these things? @DaveR offered some ideas based on a guess that the the problem is sluggish response, but you didn’t explicitly say that is the problem.
That’s remarkable because the full functionality of SketchUp doesn’t work with the web versions on an iPad. I’ve tried it. Most notably, without real mouse support, there’s now way to hover a cursor over anything. It does work on Chromebooks because they do support a mouse and an on screen cursor.
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It works quit well on a Chromebook. As an owner of both the Chromebook is a far better device for SU4School usage.
I don’t know if it’s just poor quality Chromebooks we have at our school or not, but I find that my remote students using Chromebooks have more difficulty than those using any other device. I have a Mac lab at school and those desktops are far superior to the Chromebooks some students are currently using. I look forward to getting back into the classroom where all students have a good working device with a mouse. Using touch pads on the Chromebooks is even worse.
Although some don’t mind them, I’ve never liked the touchpads on any device for SketchUp. I don’t like them even for surfing the web. A cheap 3-button mouse would be preferable.
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Well their home internet connections could be one source of the issue. Also I was replying in regards to using an iPad not a full Mac computer, two very different animals. I also agree with Dave in that a cheap scroll-wheel mouse to me works better with SU and other general 3D programs. Also some chrome books have very low specs.
I’ve converted a quad core 4th gen i5 to a very usable chrome book to test. My point is that some are better than others. One of the reasons I bought my 14 year old her own instead of renting one from her high school. A very nice Asus unit.