Problems with Huge File. Need advice.
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Hi all,
I'm using Sketchup 8 on a fairly recent Mac Pro with lots of RAM.
I've been creating a model of a multi block area of a city, complete with terrain, streets and sidewalks, buildings, trees, cars, etc... These details are required by this project since they involve proposed improvements.
As you might guess, I'm having more problems the farther along I get. I'm aware of some of the tricks to speed up modeling (use layers, components, turn off textures and so forth) but those tricks were not helping. I could hardly move my mouse without Sketchup crashing so I decided to stop trying to work with everything in one file. I decided to turn individual groups of buildings into components and work on them in separate files. That's working ok, for each individual block area, but at some point things have to be brought together into one file for final renders. When I try to place these giant components back into the base file with the terrain and roads and entourage, Sketchup crashes.
Is making sections of the model into components and working on them separately the right thing to be doing? Is there a difference between placing them back into the file as components versus cutting and pasting from one sketchup model to another? I realize the principle behind component usage is the efficiency of multiple instances of one object, which I'm not really doing.
Last I checked the size of my model when I was trying to keep it all together was about 250 MB.
Can anyone tell me what work flow they use to get huge models together for final renders? I'd be very appreciative.
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There are other reasons for using components besides just multiple instances. It seems to me that in your situation, you've made a good choice to use components for the sections. If I were doing this I would save these components into a common folder which I would use as a local components library. Then in the larger model you can easily swap the existing components for the revised ones.
In general, make sure you are purging unused everything; components, materials, etc. Work with materials turned off. Use Monochrome face style so your graphics card doesn't have to work so hard. (You say your computer has lots of RAM but how much GPU memory does it have? that could be the bottle neck that is causing you lots of problems.) Use strategies to reduce the entity count in your models. Small circles, for example don't need to have a lot of edges. Maybe there are edges and faces that aren't needed that could be deleted.
Others will be along with more suggestions I'm sure.
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which render engine do you use? if your renderer supports proxyes i strongly suggest to use them for things like vegetation and cars.. this should solve most of your problems..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQvP9idOijo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N1uzZvOw_U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSc6MblTaTE -
I use to do something similar, having many external components, but I did not use an external rendering application. For trees I had simple trees (just a stick) and the real trees. In the master file I setup my scenes and did almost everything with the stick trrees. Then I swapped them for e real trees just before rendering. Using proxies with third party rendering sounds good.
You could take a similar approach to what I did with simple and detailed buildings and simple and detailed terrain. Then have a ruby bath swap them?
David
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We have the Maxwell plug in for Sketchup, but I'm not familiar with it enough to use it on this project. Regarding swapping proxy components into the master file, I don't understand how this can overcome the failure of Sketchup to be able to "digest" the complete scene. In a way, I'm doing this swapping now, putting my blocks of buildings back into the master file, and I cant even bring the first one in with SU crashing.
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The new V-Ray also supports proxies. But this will only help you a little, unless you have a forest of trees. Layers and purging are your life savers but if you get to 175MB or bigger you are most likely in a bit of trouble from my experiences. Limit detail, keep things low poly, and use low res textures are my best pieces of advice.
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Thanks all. I'm going through and purging everything I can in each component and things are starting to work. Noticing that Sketchup will put your entire model into whatever face mode the importing component was saved in was big! Note to self: save everything in monochrome mode.
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"250MB"... mostly geometry or textures? How many polys?
Are you using high res textures in sketchup or low res dublicates?
Reducing the size of images stored in the skp can help. -
If you have the Maxwell plugin, working with proxies is the way to go. Its also very simple. Nothing complicated, just place a component that is linked to a .mxs proxy. See the manual of the plugin.
I have done much larger files with proxies, impossible to do any other way.
I could render 50 trees (700 Mb each) without much problems sraight from Sketchup. In Sketechup the trees represent just a simple volume.The way we work now is to use Sketchup as a placement tool for Maxwell proxies. The SU files are very responsive and easy to work with. No matter how complicated.
What you do is model in Sketchup parts of your model and export those parts to .mxs You can assemble those parts later on in SU.
You can put textures on your model parts either in Sketchup or Maxwell Studio. But we never use many materials in one Sketchup masterfile since this slows down Sketchup a lot. After we done the parts and have set up the .mxs proxy we delete the materials in Sketchup since they are no longer needed for these parts. That is one of the great advantages. Very small SU files.I have done office interiors with flowers, tables, seats etc that could never have been done in a single SU file unless these files would have grown into +Gigabytes monsters. Have a look here,
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=52418Proxies is how we work these days and how everybody will work in the future (with SU).
Francois
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