Trying to define SketchUp Limitations

sketchup guide jody

Re-post from SketchUp Forum - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/sketchup/thread?tid=71d09ddcd7d53100&hl=en

Hi Folks,

I'm working on defining thresholds in SketchUp before files become prone to crashing, corruption, or just too cumbersome to use so we can have a more clearly defined set of limitations to hand to new users. If we can really get a consensus on what those numbers are then I can start talking to engineers about warning users when they're about to exceed them. This is all Jody's Project (tm) but hopefully I can build a case for a better SketchUp.

I started my original post off a bit to vague so I've come up with a specific questionnaire.

What is the largest SketchUp file you've created? Would you consider it to be efficiently made (a healthy file?) Could you make it smaller? What aspects did you "write off" and just not usable in that large file? How many edges did it have? Faces? Materials?
What is the largest file you've imported into SketchUp? What kind of file was it? Did you have to alter the file any before you got it to actually import into SketchUp? Did you have to do much clean-up on the file once it was in SketchUp?
Whats the largest file you've exported from SketchUp? What kind of file did you create? How long did the export take? Did it export successfully on the first try or did you have to adjust your file or export settings some before it worked?

Thanks,
Jody

ps. I'm asking you, the users, because there really isn't a hard coded threshold in SketchUp but people still ask me "Whats the biggest image I can import?" often enough that this needs an answer.

thomthom

We need to make some definitions clear. "Large model"

Large filesize != lots of geometry

I find that the majority of a largely sized SU file comes from textures. The geometry usually doesn't represent much of the file size, especially when you use components.

A model with lots of large textures can be much more sluggish than a model with more geometry.

I have had models that's been at about 200-300MB due to textures.
And I've had models with 2million faces. (500K seem to handle just fine without too much degradation.)

One concrete example I have: a skyscraper test scene, 767K faces, 21 skycrapers (instances of itself) and some cars and people. 13MB without any materials. With some moderate basic textures: 25MB

thomthom

@unknownuser said:

ps. I'm asking you, the users, because there really isn't a hard coded threshold in SketchUp but people still ask me "Whats the biggest image I can import?" often enough that this needs an answer.

Biggest that SU can import before failing, or biggest in terms of what it makes use of? (Since we have the 1024 or 2048 limitation.)

We do have a thread somewhere, where users was testing how large they could export successfully, and with what settings. Don't have the link right now...

sketchup guide jody

Good question thom, I guess both are relevant though I was looking for byte size. I have always balked at anything bigger than 3000k on a side but if there is a thread about that'd be great info to consider as well.

solo

Great initiative, I've been hoping y'all at Google would ask these questions as it sometimes feels our gripes and whining falls on deaf ears.

I believe we need to ascertain what is an uncomfortable level first, what I mean is when does the poly count or texture drain get to a point that one gets irritated by the lag, slow responses.

If I may ask, is this thread to get a better idea of SU's limits in order to educate new users about how to deal with the poly issue, or is this so that Google can fix the issue and not limit the user?

sketchup guide jody

My initial intent was to build a list of hard numbers, engineers being engineers they balk at there being a limit. There definitely isn't anything encoded as a maximum (other than the insert material already mentioned) and I want to have a soft list that can educate new users (there seem to be more of them every day.)

Ultimately though, after I'd spent some time internally getting opinions, I'm hoping by having something conclusive that we can better focus on what "make SketchUp faster" means and have a better list of things to fix. At the end of the day I'll be happy if I have a list that any SketchUp user can look at and say "try to stay in these lines and you'll be happy." Of course these are moving numbers based on the computer power at hand, but if we can find a number for bleeding edge, average, and old that'll be great.

My initial request is more or less to find a breaking point, but if in getting that number I also find a "SketchUp is starting to suck" point then it'll be good to have. Chances are that the "suck" point for a bleeding edge computer is probably a break point for an old computer.

(Was that clear enough, I'm proving quite capable at rambling without making a point specific to this topic.)

mitcorb

Jody:
Thank you for bringing this topic up. I like to stay informed, and if I have any observations worth sharing, I hope to provide them.
mitcorb

Aerilius

Once I made a test file for components and complexity and uploaded it to 3dwh. I didn't make yet it publicly viewable because it is dangerously complex (10^9). If you are interested, I can add you as viewer.

sketchup guide jody

I think I'm going to do all of my analysis and comparisons off of what we recommend and what we list as minimum in the Help Center here: http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=36208

I figure if it breaks the top end then it will break the bottom and if it runs poorly on top then it will run worse than poorly, or break the minimum. ie. I'll look into testing most hypothesis against our proposed idea.

I'll post my results as they become meaningful in here and/or the other forum (linked up top.)

Gaieus

Hi Jody,

As I have already put my 2 cents down in the Help Forum topic, I am not repeating myself here but just to let you know, I will make this topic a global announcement for a couple of days so that no-one "can" miss it.

BTW as a GSU Team usergroup member, you can also do this any time here. Just look below the text area you are posting.

pyroluna

Hi Jody, I have some issues for big models. And what I mean by big in this case is units. (polycount: 86k, 205k edges - that's not that many, is it?)
I had this model of a city planning project that was something like 20km², and I wanted to make a walk-through movie. Complete disaster, because of two things:

the camera near clipping plane was way too far away from the camera
the shadows were terribly mixed up every 2 or 3 frames or so, resulting in a flickering effect

Now the first point I can understand, but I would appreciate it if it were possible to change this setting for advanced users, instead of automatically having it decided for me. The second point I do not understand.

thomthom

@unknownuser said:

the camera near clipping plane was way too far away from the camera

SU doesn't deal with large (or too small) lengths. At some point you end up with the clipping. The camera settings does affect when you encounter it, parallel view will encounter this faster than perspective.

@unknownuser said:

the shadows were terribly mixed up every 2 or 3 frames or so, resulting in a flickering effect

The dreaded shadow bug, apparently it was fixed in some older SU version, but due to licensing issues it had to be removed. It occurs when the camera's eye is within the shadows.

tomot

The attached picture contains 118,468 vertices, 236,928 faces
Its rendered using Vray for SketchUp, which I'm the currently beta testing.

in .off format this objects size = 6,128 kb
in .obj format this objects size = 4,297 kb
in .dxf format this objects size = 43,433 kb

when the .dxf file is imported into SketchUp the saved the SketchUp file size = 40,186 kb

For all practically purposes its impossible to do anything with this file in SketchUp.

Rotating 90 degrees, Grouping, or Ungouping this object can can many hours. I have never waited long enough to see this happen. I usually use another program such a Rhino that can perform rescaling, rotating, in almost real time, then import it back into SketchUp.

A few members of the Ruby forum have also made valiant efforts to write an .OBJ Import function.
It would be really great to improve the Import .OBJ file function of SketchUp, since it already contains an Export .OBJ function.

And I almost always cry when I see only 1 of my 4 cores working, when I'm using SketchUP.

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=27812

Frederik

Tomot... Have you tried orbiting the model using "Wireframe" as facestyle...??
It's my experience that SU is able to handle quite high poly models, if you use the Wireframe facestyle...

thomthom

Ah yea - tomot mentioned one of Sketchup most troublesome limitations: exploding/grouping large amounts of geometry. It doesn't even have to that much geometry before it stops, some tens of thousands.

tallbridgeguy

Would it be possible to post some guidelines for this study? (yes I am an engineer and we need guidelines)

At work we import a terrain model from microstation (CADD) and SK will slow down to a crawl if the file has too many faces. We have to move completely in wireframe mode to do anything.

So by guidelines I mean,

How do I compare my slowness to someone else's slowness? Based on faces, edges, file size, etc?
I also found my AMD quad (4G ram) and NVIDIA geoforce 9400 GT card doesn't work as well as my intel quad at work. So is it a hardware thing?
Could someone post 5 different size files and then we could see which one slows down our machine?

I love sketchup but I am getting annoyed at the file size issues. I would really love to model a square mile of terrain.

Thanks for posting this and I will help as much I can!

TBG

JuanV.Soler

For me this is the limit of LAYOUT,
the use of images should not speed down the software so much, should it ?
images are only about 45kb each
there must be about 140 of them in the file, is it too much ?
I attach the file
salud ¡

the mystery is that the layout file is only 33,5 kb

fundación civil.layout

sketchup guide jody

Thanks for the responses folks, there is some great info so far. Same with the questions, I'm also trying to hone in on what i'm asking for as well. At the end of the day I want to have a set of boundaries for new users to help get them rolling, ideally it will help make better best practices as well. If I get my drothers then we might also someday see a dialog in SketchUp when you start to "over do it" with your imports or exports. I think the new SketchUppers would benefit by the dialog that says "You're about to import a 45Mb DWG, please be aware that this could take a while or possibly fail. Are you sure you wish to continue." Or something akin to that.

This is a VERY hard list to build as there are so many variations that make the lines more blurry. I very clean DWG might import fine, or a DWG from AutoCAD may perform better than a DWG from Revit. I think we could get a loose set of guidelines that accounts for this. Here is my completely off the top of my head version of the questions I asked at the beginning.

1. What is the largest SketchUp file you've created? Would you consider it to be efficiently made (a healthy file?) Could you make it smaller? What aspects did you "write off" and just not usable in that large file? How many edges did it have? Faces? Materials?
*- 120 Mb SKP created or edited (these are customer files I've worked with)

Some Yes & Some No
Usually Yes
Shadows, Materials, Some Styles, some Layers
Largest I've seen 2 million+ edges (forgot faces, I always look at edges as my complexity gauge)
Hundreds*
2. What is the largest file you've imported into SketchUp? What kind of file was it? Did you have to alter the file any before you got it to actually import into SketchUp? Did you have to do much clean-up on the file once it was in SketchUp?
*- DWG/DXF - 30-40 Mb // JPG/PNG - 5-10 Mb // TIFF - 10 Mb
Before
DWG I don't create DWG anywhere but SketchUp but have worked with many DWG that needed cleanup before its used, usually to remove BIM data
Raster - I often try to reduce the raster image file size before importing, or crop it to just the data I need
After
DWG - I always clean up after import, removing unnecessary lines, fill faces, purge or combine layers
Raster Images - nothing to clean up, just position*
3. Whats the largest file you've exported from SketchUp? What kind of file did you create? How long did the export take? Did it export successfully on the first try or did you have to adjust your file or export settings some before it worked?
*- Largest exports are always animations though I have no hard numbers. Generally a complex animation is 100Mb+ and takes 1+ hours to export. When I can't export I start turning off export settings before altering the file.
Usually if edits need to be made to the actual file its because the SKP is large/complex and "messy" (bad layer usage, possible flakey geometry such as tesselated faces or unnecessary geometry disconnected from the main drawing.*

To be continued...

mitcorb

Let me ask something in another way:
In Sketchup, if 0,0,0 is the center of the model universe, what are the outer limits, if any, of the theoretical sphere of usable space. I assume the inner limits are 1mm in any direction.
I suppose there are qualifications or dependencies to my question, that I am unable to imagine at this time. If there are, please point them out.
Thanks,
mitcorb

the.pjt

Sketchup uses Only one cpu core . if you have a 4 core cpu ,it only uses 20% cpu in video rendering etc ...

It cant handle large textures .it cant hold many textures and it crushes when you use big images in many materials .
and you cant edit it easily using wireframe metod

we need a better built in Texture tools and uv mapper .plz put plugin : UV tool inside the SU .we have problems with Rendrers .

cant hold many many geometry , and too slow .

when you have some plugins , toolbars become a big problem . and if you just install a new one you should rearrange all toolbars . Please Use tabs for putting toolbars and arenging theme like MS office .

extremly needed : a built in support for curve lines and curved faces ( NURBS . etc ... ) just like layout splines .

some plugins should be builtin like Join Push pull .

a cache or compling metod (if possible) for ruby codes . startup takes very very time if you have some plug-ins . windows prefetch metod makes it start a bit faster but ...

uses these advanced tools in SU pro . and leave SU free ... the free SU should be simple and easy every time .