I’ve got a coworker that’s experiencing some issues with a SketchUp file we converted from a Revit file. It’s sitting around 110 MB so it’s kinda large but they’re running a brand new iMac Pro with 64 GB of RAM and the 10-core CPU so it shouldn’t be the computer. I converted the Revit file and have since reworked it to clean it up even further since multiple people have worked in it - that was Tuesday.
We were looking at things like the WebCache folder and such but I’m not knowledgeable enough to just say “delete it” because I’m curious to know if certain plugins or functions will quit working. I read up on the Chromium stuff that they implemented but I’m still a little fuzzy on it.
Symptoms: Very Slow when selecting, Painting, etc. Navigation doesn’t seem to be affected. But I watched them trying to paint a surface and it took an inordinate amount of time to switch tools. We’ve resized the textures to cut down on file size but it doesn’t seem to have an effect.
It runs flawlessly on my computer but I can’t necessarily say it’s a computer issue because it’s just the one file according to them.
They said that after booting their computer on Wednesday after I cleaned it again, the file was working normally, but by the end of the day it was back to running poorly.
So… I guess if anyone has any advice or tips for this then I’m all ears. I think the last resort is to copy everything to a new, blank file, and be selective about what goes and what stays. It’s entirely possible that another designer on the project broke it somehow. We have a few people here that are really good at breaking models lol
Per my usual workflow of creating a DWG export in Revit, and then selectively cleaning the layers and getting everything to Layer 0 correctly, exploding groups and such. I can usually get files down to about 30% of the original file size when it’s imported. We deal with a lot of large academic buildings/athletic buildings so our imports usually start around 300-600MB (sometimes we get Revit files that are almost 1GB) and I can usually get them down to <100-200MB. That’s our usual workflow and we haven’t had any issues with it so far. I usually delete the Revit layers one by one in order to put the geometry on Zero and then put the groups back onto a corresponding layer - i.e. Ceilings or Floors.
But as I mentioned, there have been, probably, 3 other designers putting designs into the model since I touched it initially. Some of them have been using SketchUp for several years and despite all attempts to teach them proper workflow they still manage to bog files down.
Our biggest issue is large graphic textures but for the most part everyone does a good job not importing 300 MB image files… And we usually check material sizes vis the Resizer plugin from SketchUp.
There were mentions in another thread of large models opening extra slow when the Components or Materials windows were open on startup. Exports from Revit and other BIM apps notoriously generate lots of redundant component definitions as every object becomes an unique component.
I clean out the redundancy for the most part. I use the CleanUp3 plugin and Purge like crazy but only after I’ve manually and selectively cleaned out a lot of the groups and components. It’s just the one file so it’s hard to narrow down since every other revit file we work with runs pretty well.
On the Mac that’s a negative. She uses the normal bluetooth keyboard and magic mouse. I use a Razer Naga since I utilize the keypad on it much more than the average designer here. It’s a strange issue because it’s just the one file and on the one computer lol
Should we just try to copy it into a blank template and see if that helps?