Newbie's problem with shadows :)
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Hello from Greece!!!
As a new user I have some problems and I need your help! I was working on a pc and then I opened my saved files by my laptop (which has the same operation system and the same version of SketchUp8 except that I have also installed in my laptop the "Open Studio" and the "IES". My problem is that I can't see with the laptop the shadows of the buildings that i have designed with the other pc. Some of shadows appearing after 40 seconds, remain active for 5 seconds and then disappeared again. Can you please explain me why this happen? Can you please advise me how i can solve this problem?
With kind regards
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Hi Elektra and welcome,
On your laptop, you probably have some different (usually less powerful) video card. Shadow display is accelerated by the video card therefore if it is not so powerful, SketchUp turns shadows off occasionally (mostly when you orbit for instance) to save processing power.
It will not affect your exported stuff (images or animations) so unless it is very annoying, I would not bother with it and you could even turn off shadows while you are working with the model.
What card do you have in your laptop, by the way?
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Hello Gaieus,
Thank you very much for your response!
First of all, the model of my video card is NVIDIA GeForce GT 230M. In general. the shadows display operates efficiently with the new buildings that I design in my laptop, but the problem appears when I open the file that I have already build in my other pc. The size of this file is 3.5 MB. Do you think that this size is too big, and the problem exists because of the size of this file?
Regards,
Elektra -
Not too much the file size but the model complexity - and in case of the video card, shadows and image based materials (image sizes) that counts.
Is this a new laptop? If yes, lately they are shipped with two cards - one integrated chipset into the mother board (tzhis is good enough to write a letter or browse the internet) and a dedicated card (like your nvidia) but you need to make sure that more demanding applications are set to use this card.
My system is Hungarian so you may need a bit of guess work here but here are the screenshots of the settings.
Go to your control panel (this is Windows 7 but there should be something similar) > Hardware and sound...
[image:27asricb]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Hk7Y6RJIAfA/TpKkv7GQIOI/AAAAAAAAGto/EgCMXWHWBxM/s855/Acer-02.jpg[/image:27asricb]Then to the nvidia control panel...
[image:27asricb]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-ou5QouXzSkA/TpKkvDGt0LI/AAAAAAAAGtk/VaUGmnqYHPk/s855/Acer-01.jpg[/image:27asricb]Then 3D settings
[image:27asricb]https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-lrBPbU8SWW0/TpKkwT-tZ2I/AAAAAAAAGts/vzA6E9_q4gM/s920/Acer-03.jpg[/image:27asricb]And if your setup is like mine, either make sure to set your nvidia card as default for everything or in the next step, go to program specific settings and set SketchUp (at least) to use that card.
[image:27asricb]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-CQU3HShpBUw/TpKkw3ei0fI/AAAAAAAAGtw/Bk9KrJ1yvKw/s915/Acer-04.jpg[/image:27asricb]
Now if your system is not set up this way and this is all your card can "offer", you will need to learn to work this way or at least disable shadows while you are working.
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