I use sketchup 12 hours a day and have done for the last 8 years,
I 3D Model Entire Sheds & Export the Bill of Materials.
I use Layout to Produce the Engineering Drawings.
I have noticed that 2024 is causing crashes that 2023 didn’t (Running 4070 RTX Nvidia)
I feel that Sketchup is going more towards the none technical person, trading smarts for looks.
The ability to export accurate material list & produce 3D Engineering really is the best thing about sketchup, but seems this new Engine is purely to produce cleaner visuals.
Every architect I work with tells Sketchup is for Kids, Revit it is for the big boys.
Getting hard to keep supporting Sketchup (Only professional I have met in Australia who uses the software the way I do with 5000+ components been generated)
Please tell me my install is wrong, or simply changing to the Classic Graphics Engine is my solution!
I’d expect a model like that to be a Struggle in any version of SketchUp tbh.
The new graphics engine is an update for SketchUp’s renderer, this shouldn’t affect so much the way that is has to think about 15,000 entities.
If you are having crashes I imagine it is a bug in the new version (perhaps some kind of incompatible plugin?)
Have you submitted a bugsplat and asked SketchUp to see if they can see why it is crashing? They may be able to tell you why it has crashed from the crash logs.
Have you already updated the driver of the NVIDIA graphics card?
In addition, resetting program-specific NVIDIA settings resolved an issue with the new rendering engine for me.
Basically, I no longer experience any problems with complex BIM / IFC models.
However, the Outliner is currently a slowing factor that causes SketchUp to “temporarily” freeze.
I’m curious how detailed your bolt is and actually needs to be?
A simple hex and cylinder can give you length and diameter info with a small footprint.
Building on @Box ‘s suggestion, unless they are exposed to view it is rarely necessary to model screw, nut or tapped hole threads. You will need to annotate them anyway to be certain the recipient knows what size you really meant, and at that point placement and length are all that matter. As you observed, detailed threads use tons of geometry.
That’s the Size in Model, but not the size of the file when imported as a component unfortunately.
I tried this method,
Still couldn’t get the saved file less then 150kb and as you can imagine my shed has 4000+ Bolts on average, 1300+ brackets, 7000+ screws.
If I model smartly and turn off tags when im not using them its no problems, but if you forget to turn off tags and then import into layout (■■■■ hits the fan) especially doing a render.
Im pushing Sketchup further then Tekla gets pushed 90% of the time.
Sketchup Trimble should give me a license in Tekla Haha… i cant afford 10k+ per year…
I tried just having 4 lines and then only the custom attributes, was like 142kb saved file.
If you open a blank model, save the file its still 120kb completely blank.
For me to have 14k+ components I pretty much need the file sizes of my components down to like 1-5kb per item and even then still will be like 7mb file best case scenario.
I try and Model the Entire House structure, every component, flashing,screw, bolt cladding etc so i get the most accurate component take off, and on smaller jobs its okay but these big jobs really pushing Sketchup way past its limit.
Im pretty sure Tekla is the gold standard for what im doing but its like 10k a year here in Australia…
You need to focus on the edge and face counts in model info statistics, not the file size in bytes. Those and settings such as profiles and shadows are the main things that affect SketchUp performance. I have seen files that are only a few MB in size yet have millions of edges and faces that bring SketchUp to its knees. Conversely, I have seen files much larger that perform fine.
Why? I mean I guess I could see the brackets depending on what they are and how much they cost, but beyond that I can’t think of a reason to create a model down to the screw or bolt. If it’s just for bill of materials, it would be much easier to just figure number of framing members and number of bolts per member and do the math in Excel or something.
I’ve never worked with an architect on large commercial projects that models down to the bolt and screw like this - the ROI is rarely worth it. Specific details sometimes, sure, but never across the whole model. I’m not even sure Revit supports modeling like that.
I know the discussion here is more around SketchUp performance with large amounts of components, but I question if the amount of time spent to get to that amount of geometry is worth it.
