I have used Sketchup in my high school Interior Design classes for the last 5 years. This year, our school did not renew our Sketchup Pro license because Sketchup for Schools is available free, online. I have found that my students have a lot of issues using this version, especially if they’re working on it from home. I have done numerous internet searches to try and determine how to help solve some of their problems, but I have come up short. I don’t know if it’s my students’ school issued devices or their home wifi. I need some help - they’re about to start their final exams and these are very large files that I fear will give them a lot of issues when working at home.
A very common issue, especially for those users doing interior design is their models becoming bloated with heavy furniture and other entourage components from the 3D Warehouse. Those components with the excessive detail will slow SketchUp and with the web version especially during autosaves. Encourage your students to use light, low-poly components instead of the overly detailed ones.
To add to that it seems to be normal for interior designers to try different pieces of furniture in their designs. They will often download a bed, for example, decide it doesn’t work, and delete it so they can add a different one. Deleting the bed from the model space is removing the real bed from the bedroom and stuffing it up in the attic. Eventually the attic gets full of unneeded furniture. To clear out the attic in SketchUp you go to the Components panel, choose the In Model components (house icon) and click the Purge button at the bottom. After that, purge unused Materials in the same way.
It’s important that they understand the need to keep their models light and clean. This applies to SketchUp Pro, as well.
Thank you. I have showed them before how to purge their unused items, but many of them don’t start encountering issues until they get home and I’m limited in ways to help them.
Is there quick way that students can differentiate between a heavily detailed, bigger component and one that is “low-poly”?
If they have less robust internet services than the school does, their heavy models will take longer to save. It also depends on what device they are using at home.
When they search for components in the 3D Warehouse they can adjust the sliders on the left to limit their search by file size and/or polygon count.
Also, if they click on the component thumbnail instead of the Download button they can get details about the component.
Got it, thank you!
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