All my furniture components are slowing sketchup

syburn

Hi - Is there some why to have 30 odd furniture comonents and not have sketchup act like so slow?

Box

Optimise the furniture to work with your model.
Reduce the complexity to a level the works for you.
You can use low poly place holders that work for modeling or full renders, and replace them with detailed components for close ups etc...

syburn

Not sure how to do that with a model off 3D warehouse.

Which file type is best to import furniture - dwg. 3ds. odj. - unfortunately the vendor i'm looking at don't have sketchup files.

TIG

If you are using components created by [or for] manufacturers you can often find they are over-detailed.
I had an assistant who couldn't understand why her office model had become so slow to navigate.
It was fine without the furniture !
Looking at one desk alone it contained more edges and facets than the entire building model.
There were screws with slotted-heads and tapered threads holding the legs in place and so on.
All of this meant the model had loads of stuff you never saw but was still affecting SketchUp's performance...

SketchUp has to analyze each scene's geometry before rendering it - e.g. to decide if it's visible, if it cast and/or receives shadows and if it has a texture etc.
You can optimize the scene's rendering by using a simple Style, and of course not having shadows and textures on when modeling - reserving those you scene-tabs set up for final presentation/rendering...
Also assigning off-layers to more complex objects like furniture will optimize processing time.

However, if you use components with very complex geometry something has to give.
So only have those on 'visible-layers' when you really need them, use Styles, scene-tabs, layers etc to optimize your workflow.
Also consider using low-poly proxy components and swap these for complex ones only when really needed.
Check out Fredo's GhostCpmponent tool, http://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=GhostComp
There are probably others, e.g. Artisan [$] which has tools to simplify meshes etc...

syburn

Thanks for that great help TIG. I also heard that components help as they are less memory than groups. Wonder if once you add one component, you can sort of Xref it for the duplicates to help speed things up. Whats an instance? - is it just a copy of something?

TIG

Components can have multiple instances, so the amount of geometry in model's data-base is reduced by using repeated components where appropriate.
A group is just a component with one instance, that isn't listed in the Components Browser.

However, using component's does not impact on issues like shadow casting and receiving, because each instance has to be assessed individually.

If you have two components what are essentially the same in appearance, but one has 100 faces while the other has 1000 then the more complex one has x10 more checks...
You can model with the simpler one as a placeholder, then swap in the more complex one [using the select/replace options in the Components Browser] - do that when you want to 'present' the finished design...

Pixero

A "trick" I use when I have to have high poly models in SU is to set the view to wireframe select all edges and hide them.
It makes it a bit faster since SU doesn't have to draw every edge in the viewport.