Hi @benoldays, thanks for your reply.
I understand what you are saying about the Document Reference dialog box, and I like the idea of the Tool Bar addition, and have now added this custom button to my layout.
Additionally, my thoughts were also directed to the refreshing/updating of Viewports on each Layout Page. My practice is to click on each Layout Page to execute a Page View refresh. I now remember that if I do not click on each Layout Page and go immediately to Export PDFs then Layout will go through the process of a bulk refresh/update of each Viewport on each Page without user intervention. This automation I like. Is there a way to execute this bulk refresh/update other than Export PDFs?
To SU Team, the addition of a Progress Meter, would be a great attribute to keeping abreast of Layout’s processing.
I agree with @eneroth3 on materials as well.
Both would be very helpful in speeding up our workflow and consistency, and eliminating modeling traps for new users.
What should happen if an autocad layer contains geometry with various colours?
Would they be grouped separately as sub-groups? (with an assigned colour)
Or would they be coloured with a material that overrides the main group’s colour?
(ultimately a decent import manager would allow us to choose)
If the color in AC is applied to an individual object, overriding the layer color, the same should apply in SketchUp. I’m not an expert on AC and don’t know how it handles color override.
They came in with the color I assigned in ACAD but were grouped together in SU. All 3 objects were created on Layer 0 in ACAD but color was changed on each one.
The layers panel could be enhanced with a couple abilities:
A method for selecting everything on a layer, even if the objects are within other groups/components.
A ‘Colour By Layer’ mode that shows everything on a layer as one colour, even if it’s been individually assigned a colour. This would work a bit like ‘styling’ the layer.
Use of layers for assigning colours/line types in Autocad is a huge discussion in itself.
There is a great future implemented into the rotate view tool. Using the middel mouse button or the rotate tool itself, components and groups that are a little distant get replaced by a bounding box as soon as the viewport moves. On top when in textured view, those get replaced by a mono color. Both are GREAT viewport update improvements that allow for navigating smoothly though huge models/files with a lot of textures applied.
When you move the camera using the 3D mouse on the other hand, none of this happens, which leads to a very laggy viewport, depending on your hardware and the file size. (One workaround is to activate the rotate view tool or press the middel mouse button while rotating, but that is rather annoying since you can’t perform other actions during camera movement).
So right now these 2 futures are based on activating the rotate tool. The easies way to implement this for ALL devices navigating the viewport would be to activate these futures as soon as the viewport moves, no matter the device moving it. Maybe this could be activated/deactivated in the settings.
The 3Dconnexion mice are GREAT for SU! And I feel like a lot of professional users are using them.
In order for 3D mice to be useful navigating though bigger models, implementing these two futures is necessary. It is a huge pain to work when the viewport can’t keep up with your movement by a long shot.
How about having the possibility to set a viewports projection and section cut line widths and types and section fill hatches in LayOut by component classification, layer and/or group/component material?
Please, make this happen " Fix the bug where, as soon as the model size hits about 32 MB, SU gets really slow"
The greatest pain in SU is to wait when working on large files… Import 20 components, eventhough they have been selected carefully, for a decent size and weight, and it starts to get slow.
Model file size is only a secondary factor in Sketchup performance. The #1 factor is the total number of faces and edges in the model, with component instances taken into account. When these run near to a million or more, SketchUp starts to slow down.
Iv’e been fine with both 17 and 18 model size on both Mac and PC. I can take a model up until a hundred or so on my Mac but both my PC laptop and desktop can go beyond 500MB without issue.
It seems to be heavily dependent on processor speed, and to a lesser extent on graphics card.
I’ve been working with Scott Baker (@NewThinking2) on a huge SU model - the full model is just over 600MB, with tens of thousands of components, and scores of millions of edges.
I can’t work with this file - even if I remember to turn off Outliner and Component windows (leaving them open slows things down dramatically).
I can get it to open if I wait 20-30 minutes but still can’t work with it. I have an iMac with a 3.5GHz i5 processor, and a Radeon R9 M395 2GB graphics card.
Scott has the same iMac but with a faster i7 processor and a slightly more powerful graphics card with 4GB memory (I think), and it is quite usable on his machine, provided that he turns off layers with lots of edges like railings draw as solid Dynamic Components.
For some time now, I’ve only been able to work on a subset of the whole model at any one time - currently, I’m replacing solid-drawn railings with much lower edge count imaged railings to lighten the model.
Just a thought, after you open it can you move around ok or is it slow here too? Reason I ask, it that I’ve had a similar thing with some v.large models.(I say some, not all), cut along story short. It was my style I was using. If you turn profiles off in the style settings suddenly it all worked smoothly, su was getting bogged down rendering profiles for a vast amount of edges (in my cases, it was lots and lots of modelled detail, timber cladding profiles). So looking at activity monitor, I could see had opened the file fine but was then churning away creating the profiles. Worth a shot maybe. Good luck
A pretty good video on speeding up SU can be found here:
This just came out so it deals with the latest version, though I think most of this will work on older versions too.
We are doing most of this already with the 630MB model John and I are working on - well, that I am working on, since he can’t really use it anymore.
I’ve been guilty of using some overly complex 3D warehouse models because I can’t always find what I need in the low-poly world. But most of the time nearly all of this is turned off in layers.
Placemaker added about 150MB of this file when I did the site buildings for this large and dense urban site. Turning those layers off speeds things up too.
Generally, the only time i get significant slowdowns are when there is a lot of geometry to draw, or on opening/saving the file. File saving/opening are 1-2 minute exercises. I read my email during those times and then come back to SU. You DEFINITELY want to disable autosave when you have very large models, or it will drive you crazy saving at the worst possible times, and even crash the model because too much other stuff is going on. Saving has to be a separate operation with VLMs, with nothing else going on at the same time.
I always leave profiles off in styles and use the simplest styles I can get away with.
90%+ of my layers are usually off when modeling, particularly the heavy inside ones with rooms, furniture, doors etc.
I HAVE opened submodels at the same time as the main model but this can be perilous. I only do it when I have to copy stuff from a submodel to the main model and vice versa.
In general, since implementing Placemaker at the end, I know I am pushing SU and my iMac to the max., but most of my work now is in Layout or even just extracting to PDF for presentation.
I do wish SU could buffer more to my 32GB of RAM. A 630MB file ought to fit into that many times over, but that doesn’t seem to be how things work. I have 3.11TB on my HD, and most of that is still free. This cuts down on disk churn and file fragmentation, but I’m not sure how much time that actually saves. In the old days it mattered and people used to defragment their disks often.
That does indeed help, as does turning off shaded with textures and using monochrome instead, but the model is still not fast enough for me to be comfortable working on it.
And last time I tried to load the 600MB full model I gave up - spinning beachball 'wait icon for 30 min and still nothing visible.
If the model isn’t super secret would love to have a poke and see how it performs over my four vastly different Mac/PC machines?
Ive got a 16GB Quadro, 2*6GB 980ti, 2GB integrated intel and 2GB GTX all with 16GB Ram but the Quadro has only 8 but so far seems to eat everything I throw at it, impressive for a laptop! It’s pants at rendering however.
