Sketchup 26 large area terrain failure

[daniel_pidcock]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the detailed feedback on add location! There’s a bit of context that might help set your expectations a bit:

• Add Location functionality is not tied to new SketchUp releases. We constantly release Add Location changes to all supported versions, so you won’t see anything changed or fixed by installing a new Desktop release, and most of your points are not SketchUp 2026 issues.
• Add Location use is currently expected to be users who are creating a site context for their project, not an extended area of many km2. A single import can cover about 2.5-3km2, creating a model with ~100k faces and consumes ~1.8GB RAM. There’s no indication that there are a large number of users who are limited by this and the lack of any posts in Topics tagged addlocation complaining about it back this up. However it’s good that you created this post as a feature request so we can see if this receives a large number of votes.

@Martin_S

1/The ability to go higher altitude and define one box containing all terrain required. Instead of having to keep pull the box out and up and down etc etc. At the moment it stops of an indicated altitude of 200m (which is blatantly incorrect)

The 200m is not an altitude, it is a scale bar (just like google maps shows in bottom right hand corner). The current maximum box size is restricted in order not to generate massive models that can cause RAM issues with SketchUp.

@Martin_S

2/ A counter is needed, that as you expand the area selection box, tells you how many maps and polygons will be created as it goes.

We have discussed adding something like this quite a bit, but it would always be an estimate because the terrain data is not regular, and also customer interviews suggested this would be too technical/confusing for many users.

@Martin_S

3/ To be able to define not just low, medium, high but a 0-100% polygon count level that can go properly low and the same for maps. At the moment an 8km x 11km area can often create 2-3 million polygons and hundreds of maps, we have to then reduce it to .5% (using skimp, which is equally unreliable) of that size to be able to use it.

4/ Due to the immense sketchup output content size we can’t create one area in one go, but have to create many and joining them in our modelling tool.

As covered, very large area imports has not been demonstrated to be an issue for large numbers of users. If this changes, we can add it.

@Martin_S

5/The ability to be able to create 4096 x 4096 patterns and correct size patterns.

What’s the use case for power of 2 textures? Why would satellite imagery be used as a pattern?

@Martin_S

6/Add Location should ideally start at the last place you were working on.

Default location being an estimate of the user’s location was deliberately chosen, and requires no storage. If this is a big pain point for many people, we can prioritise this.

@Martin_S

7/ Why is the true north offset never 0? And, always changing? There could perhaps be an option for a flat earth.

This is because SketchUp uses the UTM map projection. Why is this an issue?

@Martin_S

8/ After you have set geolocation, you get a page titled Model Geolocated. What is the point of this page?

User testing showed that this was less confusing for most people than jumping straight to the import context. I find the extra click a bit annoying too, but I guess we are in the minority…

@Martin_S

9/ All maps created are incorrect and illogical sizes i.e. ones labelled 2048 are always 2050 etc , others are weird sizes such as 1794 x 1282!,

2050 x 2050, 2050 x 1538, 2050 x 514, 1282 x 514. They should be 2048 x 2048, 2048 x 1024, 512 x 512, 1024 x 1024 etc.

These are not acceptable on some visual systems or are resized and use a lot more memory than correctly sized ones would.

2050x2050 was required to work around some visual artifacts that we got at edge joining textures in SketchUp with 2048x2048. The other sizes are I expect due to the size of import chosen, source map tiles get cropped to fit the users selection area.

Why do you want to resize the image tiles after import? By “use a lot more memory”, do you mean graphics card VRAM, or something else? It would be good to see some examples of when this causes a hardware issue.

@Martin_S

10/ If sketchup created proper size maps, and, if they were numbered in a logical naming system, i.e. going across in lines with names such as A1,A2,A3,A4,A5,B1,B2,B3 etc I could take them, join them and create useable patterns including 4096 x 4096 to simplify things but, instead it names them as below and its more complex than it should be, to try to joining up hundreds of badly sized patterns.

Why do you need to manually join up the map imagery? We made the import tool snap to the edges of previous imports so that there would be no need for manually joining and aligning the imports.

@Martin_S

11/ Once you’ve done add location and set geolocation, you can’t go back, and have to exit sketchup if you got the location wrong.

I don’t understand this point, you can always exit add location with the Cancel/Close button, and if you want to remove the location from a model there is a “Clear Geolocation” button.

@Martin_S

12/ The human character is not required and all it does is add polygons and over the top maps if you create a terrain, default should be off.

This is part of the SketchUp template model. The default template can be changed to remove the scale model.

@Martin_S

13/ Once you have saved a large .obj file (2million plus polys) and get rid of it, then try to turn of sketchup, it locks, and you have to manually close down the program.

This sounds like an export issue? 2 million polygons sounds like a very large file, what’s your RAM usage, that could be hitting limits? Bugsplats would be a way we can investigate this.

@Martin_S

14/ Sketchup will randomly go to a full white screen occasionally (Ive had it 7 times) when setting location. Only solution is usually, to restart the pc!!!

When you say “full white screen” do you just mean the add location window, or the whole of SketchUp? We don’t see these internally. If you can share the RAM/CPU usage of SketchUp with a time stamp of when they happen and a screen shot of what is happening we can investigate this.

Best regards,
Dan