SKP Distance Limits 6 Million Meters !

ninomayda

Have a Hydrology Genius for a Customer. The Man has a Brilliant Mind for Math. More importantly, he is so tactful. Roger will never interrupt, even though he knows darn well that I'm approaching a challenge the wrong way. When I eventually give up, he'll come into the conversation and "suggest" why don't you add this coordinate to that other factor and multiply the result by 10. All along, He had calculated the correct answer and kept from interrupting until the time was right. It's a Joy working with privileged minds that in addition have the Human Touch for Respect and Humility. I've got a lot to learn from this Gentleman.

That being said, I am very hesitant about "suggesting" back to my customer that we should consider establishing a "Project Origin" instead of bringing into SKP his World Coordinates that place the hydrology models as far a 5 or 6 million meters from SKP's Origin (Equator).

I'm noticing Screen Flickering and Cameras getting "truncated" when working with such large distances from the origin. Models behave very smoothly if I move them closer to the Page Origin.

Questions Are:

Are there "Limits" to SKP dealing with such distances? Am I experiencing normal natural behavior? How much more can I "push" SKP?
What are the Engineering "Conventions" to relocate the customer's models close to SKP's Origin using the Geo-Location Features? How can I give Roger his "comfort zone" and demonstrate that we can move my "Relative Origin" to place his model back on his Real World 1:1 Northing/Easting Coordinates?

Regards
Nino

Krisidious

Components will allow you to work on a small area within a large model. other wise your units have to match your working area. if you're working in extremely high units you must be working in extremely large spaces. ie Planet sized view for planet sized modeling. to get around this save some geometry that you want to work on at a smaller scale into a component and then open the component in another instance of SketchUp to edit it.

as a quick fix you might try changing the units of the model back and forth from large units to very small units in order to work on smaller areas. Although I don't know if that will work for your large situation.

TIG

SketchUp/OpenGL can't cope with very large distances, it's designed for nothing much bigger than groups of buildings [conversely very small sizes have issues too].
You will get inaccuracies, 'clipping planes' and all manner of problems otherwise.

I assume you are importing CAD data ?
The Import dialog's Options let you choose to ignore the CAD origin, and it will then place the imported geometry inside a component located at the SKP origin - not miles away.

If there is one common 'point' in the CAD and SKP you can then easily Move that component and snap it into place [then lock it].
Your issues might not be over...
If the CAD file contains blocks that become components when imported there is no issue if the blocks origin is placed near its geometry, but if the block's origin is at the CAD origin and the geometry miles away then similar clipping issues etc can still happen... to fix it explode these groups, or if you want to keep the separation select it and use the context-menu 'change-axes' to relocate the component's axes near its geometry - you can see components' axes if you set it under Model Info.
Another rarer glitch is with blocks imported into the CAD file, initially using the wrong units, that are then scaled down by say 1/1000 in the CAD file, rather than their geometry scaled down by that, so when they become SKP components they are actually in the database 1000x bigger that expected, so a CAD-house-block >> SKP-house-component that measures 10m in the model might actually be 10km inside its definition ! To fix that you can rescale the definition in the context-menu...