How big is too big?
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How big is too big?
What are the practical limits to the number of faces in a drawing (assuming say ... 2gb RAM with an nVidia 9500 mid-range 512mb graphics card)?
Is faces the biggest determinate of performance?
How large/complex can a model get before it gets unworkable?
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Edges and faces - i.e. geometry - will mainly affect your CPU. the higher clock speed it has (per core - as SU cannot handle multiple cores) the better.
The graphics card will chime in when displaying shading, shadows, materials and such. If that cannot "help" the CPU (because no OpenGL compatible), this task needs to be done by the processor, too. This of course leads to worse performance.
Now I had a computer with a 2.77 GHz (single core) processor, 512 Mb
RAM and a 128 Mb Ati Radeon X550 card (I could not see any performance boost when HW acceleration was on).With this, I built amodel of 12+ million edges and 300K+ faces but of course, I used hidden layers a lot. There were no heavy materials however as it was rendered outside of SU and would be re-textured anyway. But I had no special problems with that model.
True that I can spin it around easily with my current rig.
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@gaieus said:
Now I had a computer with a 2.77 GHz (single core) processor, 512 Mb
RAM and a 128 Mb Ati Radeon X550 card (I could not see any performance boost when HW acceleration was on).With this, I built a model of 12+ million edges and 300K+ faces but of course, I used hidden layers a lot.
Gaieus ... thanks a lot for the benefit of your experience.
I have a Intel Core 2 Quad running at 2.83 Ghz with a (probably underpowered a little bit) nVidia 9500 512mb GPU.
My model has about 800,000 faces.
I am facing many performance issues (even with layering effectively).
Is this the experience I can expect with a model this complex?
I am taking steps to reduce model complexity and so hoping for an improvement.
Any advise would be much appreciated.
Cheers.
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Well, I saw you commented in the "purge topic".
So also purge regularly (although what is not in the model window, should not significantly decrease performance maybe only when autosaving for long seconds or even minutes).
And there are very nifty plugins nowadays. If you use components extensively and smartly to keep your file size down, you may have noticed that just keeping file size down won't affect performance when high poly components are orbiting on the screen. But here is Fredo's "GhostComp" plugin with which you can keep a low poly version (or even just a symbol) on screen, navigate and work easily and only turn on real components when rendering/exporting something.
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This topic is crucially interesting to me right now.
Elsewhere in this Newbies forum I have described a problem
"Type faces for Maps" with one of my very first SketchUp models.It is really just a 2D drawing, a street map of about 1.5 square
miles with lots of tiny alleys, hence lots of small text.The size of the SKP file swelled to about 30 MB, which a
friend called "titanic" compared to other models. I have no
way of knowing; I'm a newbie.Other numbers, from the "Model Statistics" panel, show that
it has, at one of the recent revisions of the drawing:Edges: 344768
Faces: 120967
Component Instances: 783
Component Definitions: 399
Layers: 9
Styles: 1... and all other stats are 0.
It uses no colors but black, and has no textures
or other bitmaps -- just edges and text, in only
two fonts (Arial Narrow and Century).So my model looks quite modest compared to the one Gaieus
described. I tried to Purge it, and reduced it only about 1 MB
or about 3%.Still, 30 MB is much larger than some e-mail attachment limits.
And I have to wait for it often while it loads on my little
MacBook.Is this file small, medium, large, titanic... or what?
Thanks to all.
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That model of mine was only about 6-7 Mb. I believe that those many 3D text groups that you inserted make it so big. The only solution for that could be to insert a character of each letter into the model, make it a component and use those component definitions to put your text together. But I certainly know this would be so tedious that you rather wait while SU is lagging.
But you could definitely put all those 3D texts on a separate layer and hide it while working with the model.
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In an earlier thread it was also noted that while using components has the effect of reducing file size on disk, they tend to have a negative effect on performance when the model is open. This happens if the model is deeply "nested", that is, has many components that have subcomponents inside that have subcomponents etc. A typical example is a 3D Tree component that may consist of many branch components, that have sub-branch components that have leaf components. If everything inside is exploded, the file size becomes larger, but the computing effort required from SU becomes smaller, while the actual polycount remains the same.
Anssi
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Hi folks.
See this SU file for ideas.
Tricks for working with large files.skp
Use the Scenes tab on top of the model window.
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