My model is a huge city, 6.5km at the widest. I have an issue that when I zoom into it, to take screenshots and move around, anything close to the camera gets cut off.
My other issue is that I want to find some piece of software that let’s me walk around my city or house or any model. I want it to be freeware, as I am not doing anything professional with it and can’t afford a 200 CAD price tag for something.
Is the model scaled properly? If it has 6.5km in reality but 10m in Sketchup, you’re gonna get something that’s called “near plane clipping”. That happens because Sketchup cuts off everything that gets too close to the camera (eg. less than 10cm). If you scale the city up, this shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
Talking about your second issuee: it should be possible in SketchUp! Well, kind of.
SketchUp’s got tools called Position Camera, Walk and Look Around. They’re hidden in the Camera toolbar, you can show it by going to View>Toolbars and checking the “Camera”.
Select the first tool (Position Camera), click on the ground and type the height of your “person” to the Value Control Box. Then select the third tool (Walk) - by dragging with left mouse button, you walk. When you press the mouse wheel now, you can look around.
Yes the Model is scaled properly, I made sure of that.
I’m not a fan of that feature because of the other issue. When walking around, any close details are gone. The walking is also wonky, and I would rather use WASD and the mouse to look around, like all games on PC do.
Interesting… Could you share the model or is it private or something?
Try to check these issues:
A related help topic:
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I couldn’t find any extension for “walking through” a 3D model. If nobody else knows, you’ll probably need to google 
EDIT: This looks promising: http://workshops.ko-opmode.com/
Well, maybe my model is just TOO big. It’s a huge one, a full sized 6 x 6 km city. I wish I could take some decent screenshots though, that’d be nice. It only works when the FoV is set to 1.
I’ve also had the disappearing act happen to me, but only in 2 cases. First, in my largest model. Second, in a similar situation even though the model itself wasn’t very large. What I had done was place my objects very, very far away from the project’s main axis point or origin (the default R,G,B lines) on accident. When I moved my objects over to the origin, it stopped happening entireley. In conclusion, it’s not actually the size of your model that is causing it, instead it is how far away you are from 0,0,0 coordinate (the origin). If one corner of your city is already at that corner, then you shouldn’t encounter the issue near that origin point (I think). A possible solution might be to find the approximate center of your city, and move the entire city until the center of your model is on the origin. That should cause all parts of your model to be as close to the origin as possible, and may eliminate the issue.
As far as walking around, it is possible with a free program that’s actually extremely robust for a free program. On top of that, it does real-time rendering which you may be interested in as well.
That program is Unreal Studio Beta. Countless games are built on the Unreal engine, and with a little work and googling, you can import your sketchup model into Unreal Studio Beta using an extension/plugin called Datasmith. Once you’ve done that, you can do everything from adding lights/fog/sunlight/clouds/everything you could imagine to creating a playable game using WSAD/mouse or even a console controller with joysticks. Heck you can even send it into VR. Unreal is an extremely capable editor, and with that comes complexity and a steep learning curve. However, if all you want to do is be able to walk around with WSAD, you should be able to google your way to success. The difficult part will be making it so your character doesn’t fall through the floor because the geometry hasn’t been assigned collision properties. Essentially the opposite concept of an invisible wall; your floor is visible but you fall right through it.
With that, I wish you, and anyone else reading this, luck with getting these things to work. I will say it’s rewarding when you do!
I later found another reason; this can happen after importing a CAD .dwg file into the project.