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.

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.

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.

@freewilly said:

I installed the plugin on my Mac.
I see it in the file menu, and can start an import.
But after a certain time it aborts an I get an error window "<error> or empty File".
I have tried different DXF-Files.

What do I do wrong?

Rolf

I'm having the same problem. No matter what I do to prepare the file in illustrator, the import dxf dialog in sketchup gives me that error window and quits the import.