Trying to define SketchUp Limitations
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@unknownuser said:
Thanks for the responses folks,........ SNIP...........To be continued...
With all due respect Jody, you are gathering meaningless information, information only useful for constructing Excel spreadsheets. Why don't you import any file and see if SketchUp can rotate it. I'm currently waiting for SketchUp to rotate an object from a plan view to an elevation, (90 degrees) its been now 2 hours and not much is happening, its as if Sketchup is stuck.
The imported file has the following
Vertices 61,932
Faces 116,176
SU import size after save is 9.55MBas you can see it does not take large files for SketchUp to grind to a halt.
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@tomot said:
The imported file has the following
Vertices 61,932
Faces 116,176
SU import size after save is 9.55MBThat should be no problem for Sketchup. As with of 7.1 I've managed to work with models of 1.000.000+ faces.
Some possible reasons comes to mind:
- Hardware acceleration is turned off
- Underpowered graphic card
- Shadows, Profiles or other Edge effects are on (these are killers)
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@thomthom said:
Some possible reasons comes to mind:
- Hardware acceleration is turned off
- Underpowered graphic card
- Shadows, Profiles or other Edge effects are on (these are killers)
I can assure you its None of the above, but perhaps its Vray related
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If you want I could try it on my machine.
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The major limitation is that it is SLOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWW.
Did you get that Google? You have written the ONLY program that manages to bring my Macbook Pro to it knees. Well done. I have spent maybe 30% even 40% of the last 5 hours of my life watching the spinning beachball of doom.... Honestly if Bonzai gets a little bit more stable (i.e. doesn't crash every 5 minutes) I'm gone.
Your latest release, 7.1 took nearly a year and in my opinion is only Beta quality. Without the 3rd party plugins SU would be dead and I'm sure 99.9% of your users wouldn't bother due to the default tools being old hat.
The model I'm working on is a simple house, on a SMALL site. But place 2 trees and four plants and voila... beachball. Orbit, beachball. Pan, beachball. Zoom, beachball. Move component, major beachball.
How about this for a new tag line?
SketchUp Pro, Waiting is half the fun.
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Can we please try and stay on topic? As i previously mentioned this thread is to try and define sketchups limitations, not just repeat the fact that they exist for the hunderedth time.
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Thanks everyone for this great feedback. I'm still pumping it into my document and rolling along. I'm blown away by the 8.7m edged model and and am happy to hear that you're still a fan of SketchUp while working at that size! Most users (as has been seen since that post) don't approach that size and get frustrated well before they get there. In your case, Jopsa2 it looks like avoiding materials for as long as possible is a win, and then patience as you allow SketchUp to render. I'd think Sandbox tools could benefit from Multi-Core if you allow that it still has to bake, and of course the same for output to video or raster.
The changing over time in this thread really illustrates that its a hard question to define and to answer. The tips for modeling smarter are further proof to that and in their own way define limitations as well. Every post has been helpful so far (even those that wander into dislike of SketchUp.
Right now I'm looking at 3 key areas that need definition to help new users:
File Limitations, these are things like file imports and exports, what you add to or take away from the process.
Usage Limitations, things that are generally handled with smarter modeling. You might call it the educational limitation as not everyone has these problems and many power users find a way to overcome them.
Functional Limitations, SketchUp just doesn't create circles without segments, it won't model well under 1mm, and it really doesn't like models that are miles in scope.
Some of these are constant problems that we're aware of and constantly trying to fix, some of these are the result of SketchUp being so useful that people want it to do more than it was ever intended to do, and some of it is new information that its hard to see in a QA lab. I'm hoping to build some test case files based on this feedback and may do a new post in the near future with those files to see about getting a performance test from users of varying computational power or skill sets.
Until that time, I'm still reading and still quite appreciative of this data. Thanks everyone for your feedback so far. (c:
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I was just thinking... Wouldn't it make sense to some degree to create or choose three files/models(medium, large and very large) for people to download and test and then report the results. Would this not create a control group by which to gauge performance, since there probably is a great deal of difference on how different machines and setups would handle those models? If this is listed somewhere in this thread or was asked already, I missed it so sorry if this is redundant.
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Define "large"
Large file size?
Lots of geometry?
Large in size - width,length, depth?All these has their different restraints in SketchUp.
A model with little geometry can be much slower to handle in SU if you have lots of big textures.
And Style effect also has a great impact on the performance of a model. Shadows, transparency, Edge Profile and edge colours all contribute to a model that's slower to handle.
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@thomthom said:
Define "large"
Large file size?
Lots of geometry?
Large in size - width,length, depth?All these has their different restraints in SketchUp.
A model with little geometry can be much slower to handle in SU if you have lots of big textures.
And Style effect also has a great impact on the performance of a model. Shadows, transparency, Edge Profile and edge colours all contribute to a model that's slower to handle.
Well, I suppose I did say that in a profoundly stupid manner. As to how to quantify the "size" of a model I would not know... perhaps I should of said:
"Models that would appear to someone who possesses extensive professional knowledge of the workings and capabilities of SketchUp and is also capable of taking into consideration the general capabilities and general computer hardware as possessed by the average to professional user, and in light of such consideration so judge said models as being inherently of Medium, Complex or High Complexity based on a reasonable predefined set of characteristics such as file size,number of faces,number of groups,layers,textures of moderate size or other criteria based on whatever reasonable characteristics and or model statistics would allow some method of quantifying or allowing to establish a general frame of reference by which to judge the performance of computers of different operating systems,set ups and general capabilities all using the software herein known as SketchUp."
or something like that.... I don't know... I only have about 15-20 brain cells working at one time and they can be pretty lazy at times.
I just figured it might help to some degree if one could use "clean" pre-made models of different predefined "levels" to judge their system's performance and thus contribute those findings to whatever database is being used to establish average or reasonable performance limitations...
I now realize that was a pretty dumb idea. -
Not dumb, no. It's just that defining a "large" model is a bit unwieldy and not an easy thing as there are so many factors in play. And I find that asking that question brings forth different answers for different people.
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SU has a magical UI. But the truth is that it produces terrible topology. Have a map there and be in trouble sooner or later.
I imported (as 3ds) some heavy sculpt models from blender with UV textures (2048x2048). So I had a 800k scene in SU. No beach ball on a mac pro, shadows on, orbiting was real time animation like. Because... these meshes had good topology and UVs. I tried a ~400k modeling in SU, some arches, holes etc. I use my own components only. Orbiting became heavy, beach ball now. I also noticed that thomthom's UV toolkit made my life easier, especially this frontface to back etc. Especially when exporting. Still waiting a ruby for loopcuts, or I missed something here?
And please google team, you can't ask some one to pay for an obj exporter. This is not a pro element.
An idea: Start modeling as in other 3d apps. Stop this continuous push pull, do as many individual components as you can. One texture to one component. The wrong use of pushpull and paintbasked is killing SU in the end. -
Hi Jody
Just to keep it simple.
CPU Multi-thread and GPU processor upgrade would be a good start.
Shadows and textures just kill speed of access.
Poly count seems to need just more threads to think faster.Cheers
dtr
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Michalis, could you provide an example of a large model with good topology etc? Im intrigued as to the differences it makes. thanks.
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I can do this remus, when I say good topology I mean good UV mapping too which is not always easy to do. I suspect the chaos after some resizes and stretching in SU tex editing system. Especially using large (2048x2048) textures. The holes, arches is not a SU only problem, difficult again. A good example is durant harpe's thread about exporting topology from SU. Zbrush can't handle it for example. A loop cut plugin could be useful for those who have some modeling to VG in mind. A "snapping" on, off could be nice too.
Support of multi threading and huge poly meshes is always welcome . -
Thanks for the info, i'll have a look in to it.
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These are not complains remus, we're talking about limitations. SU is a fine app as it is. Others may suffer from lot of bugs.
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Oh no, i wasnt suggesting it was a complaint, its just something i havent considered would affect the performance of SU before, so thought itd be interesting to investigate further.
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So, I don't know how I missed this last summer but its great...
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=20076
Maybe we can find a different model though, or a way to report out some system specs while also grabbing this data. Sadly I'm no Ruby guru so it might take some time. I do like the idea of any sort of benchmark tools like this so we can have an absolute value type response for different systems. (Incidentally my Core2 Duo MacBook Pro gets about 14.7 FPS from that test.)
I might re-phrase this question (which as I've said is very valuable and still is) in a new post as soon as I better define how people can gather information. This is great for general speed, I need to figure out a test for exports and for imports. (What am I forgetting that we want to test on for a whole-view of performance in SketchUp?)
Cheers,
Jody -
Hi Jody
I'm pleased you are reviewing sketchup! It's a great program, and I can't wait for the new improved version!Largest file I have created is 59.8MB, using over 10,000 2D plants with textures. It takes about 20 minutes to render shadows on my Mac Pro 8-core. I too would love to see SU using more of my available power!
One of the biggest issues I find is faces - especially large ones made with circles/arcs. This constantly causes frustration and often crashing, when trying to make a face re-establish.
For LO the biggest file I have is 298 MB, which contains several copies of the 59.8MB SU document from above, with various annotations, etc. It loads relatively quickly, but is slow to change pages (up to 2 minutes), even on my big machine.
If you are really looking to put out new version, I beg you to read SU and LO wishlists - there are so many things we'd love to have - and personally, I'd pay for an upgrade if they had them.
Thanks.
Shannon (Landscape Architect)
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