When layout gets bogged down by hybrid or vector rendering, it can be a pain to adjust as each change requires lots of time spent loading. A few ideas for faster editing of this:
“Change all viewports in file to raster” button (and/or “change all viewports on sheet to raster”)
Layers containing vector views for stacking could be locked and unaffected, but this would get you to a baseline so you could change settings as needed without waiting for a heavy hybrid viewport to render first. This would also be great for turning on hybrid rendering all at once and only when needed for output (rather than going page by page).
Ability to control hybrid vs raster output by layer
As architects we often desire hybrid output, but find it either painfully slow or necessitating a very onerous workflow (separate raster and vector scenes stacked on top of each other - fine for some projects but very slow for others with many views to manage). For us it is often only a few model elements that are heavy enough to cause long rendering times (e.g. a car or piece of furniture that is just for entourage); it would be great to set “entourage” and other layers to raster output and keep others rendering as hybrid in a single scene/layout viewport. Similar to how lineweights are controlled in layout now.
I limit hybrid views to just the section plane. It’s very fast stacked over raster view of what is beyond. With preset templates matched between SU and LO, rendering takes seconds even for 2-3 hybrid views stacked over a raster view.
I think that generally makes sense for plans and sections (Nick, do you still copy the geometry from sketchup or create a scene with fog or something to isolate the section plane?). Our use case was axo views of a sketch master plan, mostly massing geometry, so was hoping to render in hybrid. After some delay and consternation in trying to get the ~20ish viewports on 15ish pages switched, ended up exporting as raster for our deadline. (Would also love to see higher res .pdf export options than 300 dpi for zooming in, for this exact reason).
Eventually figured out the issue was a few small high-poly warehouse items (cars); should have known better.
So would have been handy today to have a) something to turn on the hybrid views (and turn them off when it wasn’t working) and b) to have been able to turn off the vectors of the offending geometry without stacking layers in layout. Have definitely learned a few lessons here but thought those features might be of use to other folks as well.
In LO you select the scene you want to show. So no copy and paste between SU and LO.
The key to speed is having templates for both SU and LO that are standardized so you can quickly create the drawings from an early stage that consider construction documents, even in the schematic design phase. Then you update as needed. Hybrid and vector view ports are on a different layer than raster. So if you want a quick update, you can simply shut off the visibility of the hybrid/vector layer and those viewports won’t update until you turn them on.
Also breaking up drawing sets by type in separate LO files instead of one document greatly increases speed and efficiency.