Some quick background. I am (attempting at) using a workflow of sketchup + plugins → layout to produce custom millwork shop drawings for commercial spaces. The niche of our business falls in an awkward no mans land where it is not cabinet-focused enough to justify a Cabinet Vision / Mozaik type scenario, but also starting to become a bit too complex to rely on just 2D line drawings anymore. On the other hand, there is enough architectural design in what we do that we are often required to model quite a bit of context which, in my view, eliminates other parametric options like Fusion 360 and Solidworks. The speed and flexibility of SketchUp is ideal for what we do, and I’ve learned enough about the nuances of dynamic components and plugins like profile builder that I can do a lot of parametric stuff using it, but my seemingly insurmountable problem is LayOut.
No matter how much I learn about it it just seems like there are some brick wall limitations to its use and I’m really coming up empty on the internet in terms of strategies for dealing with these limitations. I have a brand new computer with a decent graphics card and 32gb ram, and when I open a layout file and click on a viewport for the first time, the program hangs for 30-60 tedious seconds. Every time. This is after it has spent about the same amount of time loading the document. Talking about 30 viewports over 7 pages (11x17).
Whenever I batch re-render the viewports on the page,it fails to render hybrid correctly approximately 40 percent of the time. I’ve read that this is because my model is too far from the origin. Well, guess what, the building I’m modeling is 60 feet square and the thing that I’m trying to render is on the corner of that square farthest from the origin. The other corner is on the origin. And this 60’ square is the smallest feasible bite size that I can do for my project.
I see people post issues they have with Layout and it seems like the first reply generally is a SketchUp Sage telling them they’re doing something wrong, like having the audacity to model something that’s greater than 50 feet in width.
Or like how they shouldn’t use the native section fill feature and instead spend minutes/hours that they can’t afford (in a commercial workflow) creating 2d faces of every section cut that has to then be adjusted whenever there is a change to the model. Never mind that the section fill is a 10 year old vanilla feature in a commercial software that costs $350 dollars per year per seat with an international team of developers working on it full time.
Or like how, maybe, he should have just rendered all of his viewports using raster with max settings. Never mind that the result looks completely unprofessional compared to any vector render.
Why is it so slow? Why does it crash on a regular basis no matter what I do, even on relatively simple models and a relatively low number of sheets? Why does it screw up randomly and not predictably? How is this able to be sold at such a high price point?
My ranting aside, is there a sticky in a forum somewhere, or a youtube video, or some resource that gives a general to-do on how to mitigate the issues I’m talking about here? I’d appreciate any help.
Thank you