You can start several ‘instances’ of SketchUp
These can be on different cores
If these models share the same origin and a ‘transparant’ background, would it not be possible to ‘slide them on top of each other’ in the screen?
The camera and zoom should be the same for each model as well as the input (keyboard etc)
So you could control 8 models at the same time (8 core processor)
It would not be one model, but a set of files in a project folder.
I’m guessing the answer is no - for a few reasons:
While you might be able to set a “transparent” background in SketchUp, I think you’d also have to be able to set the entire WINDOW as transparent in your operating system. And I’m unaware of any such facility on the PC - I can’t claim any knowledge of this Mac.
Assuming you can resolve fully the transparency needs, as far as I know, any windowing OS can have only 1 window “in focus” at any one time. So you could easily do something to the “front” window when you intended to do it to something on a window that isn’t in “front”.
And assuming you can resolve both of the above, it would still be a PITA to make sure you’re in the “right” window when drawing new geometry!
There are Enterprise level solutions for that second point, we have one in work.
Perhaps not for SketchUp but some Enterprise CAD supports a similar idea. We have a large computer in the office running on 16 8-core machines. The same model is opened on each machine with the camera etc matching in each instance. However each instance just renders 1/16th of the model, a 17th machine then stitches the 16 images together for the display.
I know of several CAD model software that supports this multi PC method. So you are running the same file on many machines in separate instances but they are all responding to a single keyboard and mouse.
Rendering is possible since it’s a one way communication. Having an interactive model that can be edited is a bit harder. Extra checks would be required to prevent multiple threads from editing the same data at the same time, and this would probably counter any performance benefit.
No you can also model too, on our setup at least, not just rendering. But you are right about the perfomance boost, not really gaining anything model wise only in the visuals
There are lots of Screen apps that have a transparent window, I guess:
and let us not forget all the Augmented reality apps.
They won’t have to be active at the same time, only camera position and zoom needs to be the same with each cycle…
that would be the least of my concerns, either you change the focus by clicking on an entity which you know to whatcore it belonged to, or you could have a ‘color by core’ style which indicates the distribution level by color
I was thinking about different models by the same computer, so actually the opposite,
thus creating problems synchronising.
I am thinking about dropping models in a (zipped) folder. Each model would be edited solely, kind of how Layout zips its contents.
(So it could very well be ‘stacked viewports’ in SketchUp…)
