To keep SKP file sizes low, please consider supporting the WebP image format for textures.
We are working on a project that requires many unique textures in the model. We use low quality JPGs and PNGs for simple graphics and text. Still, SketchUp files bloat pretty quickly. Some stakeholders struggle to work with our 800 MB file.
With experience as web developer, I can say that the WebP image format is well established and has many advantages, which could benefit all SU users. For example:
better compression efficiency (significantly smaller file sizes at comparable or better visual quality)
both lossy and lossless compression modes
alpha transparency support (as in PNG)
reduced memory footprint, which is particularly relevant for large models with many textures
What resolution are you importing and working with?
Are you using the new PBR textures?
How geometry heavy are your models?
Load the plugin ‘Material Resizer’ from the SKP Team and see if you are bloating your models. I try to keep my working drawings to 1024 pixels on the long side, jumping up from there only for rendering / certain applications.
I’ll go further than ask for it for bloating reasons :
more and more images on the web are WebP. it’d be nice if we could use them as they are, without having to screenshot / export as a jpg or png in a third party app.
I’m not sure how relevant the texture size is to performance - SketchUp converts all textures (to something like openGL GL_RGBA8) and resizes them internally anyway. I think it is a max of 1024x1024 and the format used on the GPU is not the file type you input
As far as I’m aware Material resizer only helps if your .skp file is physically too large or if you need to go below that 1024x1024 size.
That said, being able to open heif and webp would be welcome and you think it would do trimble a favor as loads of things in old versions of SketchUp would not load or look weird, then someone can make an extension to overide that and then we can be back to square one again or just using regular old inefficient and ugly jpegs
Cassidy PM of Graphics here. Appreciate the post. I will take this to the team. Some good news… we are working on the performance of our textures currently. Ill see what the team says about your suggestion. Thank you so much for post.
