Sketch Up Pro 2018

Making Layer 0 the Active Layer works! I have shadows.

So what should I do to fix my model? Change all the tree components to
layer 0? I usually turn off the trees and landscape until I’m ready to
render, so I keep them on a tree layer.

In most scenes shadows appear if layer 0 is turned on.

There is also a slight glitch in the geolocation and time zone. The model is not geolocated, so SketchUp assumes it is in Boulder, Colorado, at the team’s headquarters. However, the time zone is set to GMT -7 while Boulder is at GMT -6. In some cases this will lead to missing shadows if the sun hasn’t risen yet, or has already set.
It is a bear to work with - over 5 million edges and around 1.5 million faces.

Layer0 should ALWAYS be set to be the current layer.
Unless you have a very excellent reason to set it to be otherwise !
[e.g. you are adding text or dims to the model… and you want them to get their own layers…]
Only assign other layers to ‘containers’ like groups, component-instances and images [and perhaps text and dims as outlined above].
Otherwise ALL raw geometry - edges and faces - should always be created on Layer0.
Leave Layer0 as your default current layer for 99% of your work…

I wrote an Extension that warns you when you diverge, forces new geometry to Layer0 and lets you explode containers and set their geometry to Layer0 - something that’s currently missing from native explode !

I am still waiting for SketchUp to recover from the last thing I did to your scene. I’m testing whether just hiding the tree layers makes it possible to continue working on the scene, rather than edit the components.

That took a while to test. I turned off the four tree layers, that took about 15 minutes. After doing that the scene was almost usable, and shadows came back (I had Layer0 visible and active by then, but I’m not sure which was important). I turned on each tree layer, and still had shadows after that. I had also quit a few applications to give SketchUp more of a chance.

It seems like shadows are in Layer0, and geometry trees are demanding. It could be worth looking into low polygon trees, ones that take less than 20,000 edges. And hide any layers that you don’t need to be visible while you’re working. on something else.

Just one other thing to add here - yes, definitely Layer 0 problem - that fixes the shadows but the main thing that is killing SU is the use of Profiles in the style - where you have a great deal of edges and faces in the model (such as trees and bushes and also things like lots of modelled handrails, balustrading) that absolutely kills SU - looking at activity monitor whilst SU was doing whatever it was doing for a long time - CPU maxed at 96 - 101.5% was generating these profiles - turn off profiles and yes the shadows take a small while to generate but they do, in not a totally unreasonable amount of time given the model size / complexity about 10 seconds or so.

It only came to mind as I’ve run into exactly the same issue recently where I have lots of modelled detail like timber cladding, I thought it was shadows too at first but it ended up being the profiles setting in the style. Turn off profiles - perfectly responsive (ish)model. This one is the same if you turn off profiles - all good!

Hope this helps

I was thinking of putting a feature request post about a shadow ‘baking’ option.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wodumedubvywnch/screenCAP.mp4?dl=0

I couldn’t open your video.

Nor me - I can’t work out how to get a Dropbox link to an mp4 to work. Anyway it was just showing your model moving about nicely and generating shadows quickly

Curious that the dropbox video didn’t work. That may be something that can be fixed in the forum.

Here’s the video (I hope):

http://colin.scienceninja.com/screenCAP.mp4

Yep that works. Thank you

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