Taking an hour + to import a small model?

7,910,396 Edges,
3,557,104 Faces,
116,294 Component Instances,
25,462 Groups,
11, 817 Component Definitions

I repeatedly purge the model.

So far with Hidden Line Style active, it still chokes on any further addition to the model.

Wow! And you consider that a medium-sized file? I expect most computers would choke on that.

I apologize if I misled you to believe there was an easy solution for this. That was my mistake, I should have asked more detailed questions about the file in question first. The truth is not all 200MB files are created equal, some are bloated with unused components or hi-res textures. 7 million edges is a massive amount of geometry to process, I imagine you were seeing slow downs during other operations before the import problem? I think you may be reaching the limit of what your CPU is capable of.

I’m racking my brain about what could possibly drive the poly count that high. I’m guessing plants, lots of plants.

Sorry - no - that’s the large file.

Understood - don’t feel bad about offering a light at the end of the tunnel! Ultimately this project will work out, it will just take a bit longer.

The project involves over 400 different houses, each with features like real lap siding, complex windows, roof shingles at ridges and so forth. There are no plants yet. By the time it is finished, not only will there be more buildings, but there will be a HUGE increase in the number of plants, animated people and traffic - both car and bicycle. A hundred million more polygons - or more, based on the last one of these I did.

Fortunately, this will all happen in Lumion, which seems to handle the geometry fairly well. I should mention it will also contain a complex location geometry mesh too.

Yeah, that’s going to be a heavy lift. I think most people working at that scale would be striving to limit the details / poly count of individual houses. There is an art to lo-poly modeling, targeting quality specifically for your output deliverable. Just barely good enough, is perfect. But I’m sure you have your reasons for needing the details. Good Luck!

I work on similar projects (housing developments).
200mb is a fairly small file for me (1.5gb is a big file) but I’ve developed a lot of workflow techniques that make things manageable (including sending to lumion).

Your file size suggests a lot of similar houses but with a LOT of components and groups (otherwise file size should be much higher). Any chance the buildings are imported from Archicad ?
One big improvement might be to turn off edges, hide them where possible. try to reduce the number of groups and components (all cladding pieces dont need to be in individual groups). This can be automated with extensions.
The slowness also suggests something might be a miss in the format Importing 4mb but from a different program format which has been (poorly) converted to SKP? Might be best to open it and explode and reorganise the conponents/layers etc prior to import. Could also be that you’re importing things a long way from the model origin (or using different geolocation settings).

I’m happy to take a look at your project on the weekend if you can send me a file via dropbox or onedrive or similar. It probably wont help your looming deadline but might give some useful info for the future.

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Wow - thanks so much Sam! I hate for you to spend time on this on a nice summer weekend though.
An alternative would be for me to just hear a little bit more about your workflow and how you organize things.
May I share a bit about my workflow - so you could give feedback / advice?

This is the second large development I’ve done, the first was over 1,000 houses, this is over 400, so it’s actually smaller overall. However - the first one was on a mostly flat terrain, and this one is on a mesh - so I have to do labor intensive things like lot grading and driveway grading.
My software workflow :
In-house cad → Revit–>Sketchup–>Lumion–>Premiere Pro.

The lap siding is just a wall profile, not individual lap pieces. Imagine a smooth wall cut by triangular voids. I bring in the base house geometry into Sketchup, make some fine geometry adjustments, swap out special components and paint it up, this goes to sit in a catalog which I draw from to populate the development per an initial product layout PDF I have.

It would be a lot faster to do the importing in Lumion, but I thought (erroneously) that with a development that was so much smaller than the last one that I could assemble all the houses in a single file and then do lot grading and driveway grading with the houses right there on the mesh.

In retrospect, I should have imported simple proxies of these houses and used those to do the grading. Once the terrain was regraded I could have opened up the Windows file where I keep my high resolution sketchup models, and gone in and renamed them to match the proxy names, and then moved them into the proxy folder (after first moving the proxies out to store in an adjacent temp file).

I think then - the final model would open up with the high resolution houses. Nothing would be imported, just refreshed. Does that sound about right?

I could also have just made several large groups of houses in Sketchup - small enough to keep Sketchup from choking - and imported these into Lumion. That’s basically what I did on the last big project.

I’d love to hear more about your workflow. Thank you again for your generosity in offering to help me think this through!

Aiden

Hi Dave - I think I may have found someone else who is talking about this issue from a programmer’s point of view.

Here’s an excerpt: (by the way - the bolding is from the OP)
Between two Sketchup instances, however, you cannot move geometry. So natively, you have to copy via memory.

And this often takes many minutes . One minute. Two minutes. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty minutes, indeed. And counting. So, why is this?

Apparently, Sketchup forces lots of internal consistency checks when copying to memory. When creating new containers. When doing many other things. These checks are incredibly slow. From a programming point of view, Sketchup’s behaviour is most likely very badly optimized . There is either something sloppy about the internal database structure, or about how it is being processed, or about both.

We know this because other 3D modellers are much, much faster doing similar tasks. Both copying between instances and doing other editing of non-trivial geometry. Sketchup can do OK in terms of showing complex geometry. It’s editing that grinds it to a halt.

While we’re staring at Sketchup’s blank and irresponsive screen after a sizeable copy, no processor core is even near maxing out. So this process may be memory-bound. Its slowness does not matter when working with three cubes, for it escapes notice. As it did around twenty years ago.

However, when working with contemporary, real-life models, i.e. complex geometry, like you and I do, the recurring waiting times is a real pain .

All this would be bearable if it were not for the fact that other 3D modelers do perfectly fine without all this waiting time. Which proves this is unnecessary:

Can you comment from your perspective on the idea that the way Sketchup performs internal consistency checks can impact those of us who work on larger scale models?

Aiden

I’ve one suggestion which I don’t see mentioned already.

When opening a large SU file, it goes MUCH slower if either (or worse, both) of the Outliner or the Component Browser windows is open.

Close, or at the least, minimise, both those windows before you start the import. It might make a difference.

Hi John - Right - good advice. I’ve noticed the slow down as well. In this model I keep the Organizer out of the default tray completely. I have also closed the Component browser from time to time as well.

With that said, it isn’t too difficult to get the big file open and running really, and it is reasonably responsive to work in - for it’s size. It really is the import issue that is the most …well - frightening? of all the difficulties I’m handling now.

Sorry, then, my suggestion doesn’t help. You’ve tried it already.

A very good suggestion nonetheless though!
Thanks for sharing your time and effort to help me solve my problem John!

Aiden

A couple more thoughts, again, one at least has been mentioned already.

When I reread the thread from the top, I see @TDahl has already suggested closing the Outliner. Sorry Tom, I missed that on first reading.

In one of your early posts, Aiden, you mention that you HADN’T tried cut and paste. Have you since tried opening the small 4MB file, turning on everything you want to import, and then Copy to clipboard, open the large file, then Paste into it?

And what style(s) are you using? Turning both profiles and edges off in both models might speed things up, and turning off hidden line and object visibility might help too.

(@AK_SAM suggested turning edges off, but you didn’t say whether you had tried that I think.)

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It’s middle of winter here, mate :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s hard to explain, and i only have a few minutes so excuse the rushed response (word dump), but:

  • Houses (each house or typology, or block) is modelled in a seperate file (as you’re doing).
    To import, or, prior to importing, a version is made where it’s exploded from 100s of groups into just a few.
  • Colours and variations are added as much as possible using the Default Materials (so no need to create seperate component instances if just the colour is different).
  • Additions like balconies are also added to base typologies.
  • All fencing, trees, landscape objects etc belongs to its own group seperate to the houses. And fences, for example, are also exploded (instead of having 30 pickets as individual components).
  • Dont have more than about 50 scenes and 50 layers.
  • Dont split componets across too many layers.
  • I dont use outliner at all (too slow), and make sure Component and material browsers show just the folder icons as the default, not a huge library open.
  • Layers are the main way to organise the model, and each scene = 1 page in LayOut.
  • Complex assets like trees are created using Proxies (dummies), then only 1 of each tree type is needed in the model (and it’s placed in the corner of the site and on a hidden layer).
  • if necessary you can use proxies for houses as well, eg 1 house typology has all the furnuture and internal walls, and the rest have none (just a shell).
  • when creatiing componets, keep them simple - one of the issues is with curves - eg a i had a Stove components where each element and knob had 100s of edges to create the shape of the stove - totally crazy. Anything repeated needs to be simplified.
  • extension ssuch as CLF Loose to Groups, and Selection Toys (Groups to Components) can convert things.
  • Avoid scaling things, then scaling them again. Eg a fence might have some pickets that are scaled, then the whole fence might be scaled, then a group of fences might be scaled. Just hit “reset scale” wherever possible.
  • Avoid using large textures. Try to swap them ut in Lumion/Twinmotion.
  • Avoid dynamic components!
  • Import simple things into complex things, not th eother way around (eg a terrain may be easier to import intoa House model than the other way around, even though it seems illogical).
  • If you hit a “CPU wall”, then split that thing in half. Copy and paste half at a time.
  • sometimes the imported geometry has hidden junk that needs to be exploded, flattened, scaled or whatever…even seemingly simple AutoCAD Site plans can have wierd junk. Try importing via simple formats like DXF or old versios of DWG instead. DAE and OBJ can be really problematic. Unfortunatley autocad files in particular or survey plans have lines that are modelled to very tight accuracies, beyond what sketchup is designed for. This is a problem I dont know how to solve. Retracing it can be the best appoach but to check if its occuring, change your modelling units to millimetres and see it you have a lot of stuff that’s not quite ‘straight’.
  • use only component s& materials saved locally, dont reference or open browsers from a network location (even if you have 1000mbit in your office)
  • save backups eg version1, version 99…dont just save over your file. Save Copy As. And turn off autosave & backups (prefernces).
  • turn transparency quality to lowest

Basically, for large modelling, sketchup struggles with:

  • lots of edges visible
  • component/group heirarchies that are nested very ‘deep’ (more than a few layers) - we see this a lot on houses and vehicles.
  • too many components and groups overall, especially if they are used across diffeent layers and nested within various components. (we see this on things like trees where every leaf is a component, and scaled somehow)
  • anything a long distance from the model origin. This effect becomes worse if you have small objects (eg 100mm ) within a large site (eg 1km).

When Importing to lumion, do it in chunks, eg terrain, followed by block 1 houes, etc. and keep a reference point ( a cross in the corner of the site) as a ‘snapping’ point.

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Sam - what a generous reply - I’ve read it all and I’ll be re-reading it and thinking about it.
I can see at least one thing I need to do right off the bat, and that’s to simplify everything within the house to a small set of groups and reduce layers. I’m eager to see if I can get any improvements.
I’ve got to hit the road for a family get together several hours away. Will start experimenting when I get back next week.
Again - thank you so much Sam!
Have a good weekend mate! (I see you are in NZ - how northern-hemisphere-centric of me to wish you a nice summer weekend. :upside_down_face: There - now I can see you properly.
Stay warm!

Aiden

Hi John - more good suggestions - most of which I’ve tried - however - I haven’t done Copy Past recently. I’m on my way out of town - but when I get back I hope to recheck this forum page and engage with the solutions on the model to see if anything frees up.
Have a great weekend John,

Aiden

Hi John - good old fashioned cut and paste did the trick. Thank you so much for suggesting it.

Aiden

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