A solution I have hoped to see is a two-window solution where I can have my drawing window be on one screen, but then have all the other modules docked on a separate window on my second monitor.

Just a thought.

Hey Google:

Hire. Chris. Fullmer.

And if they don't hire you Chris, you should apply for a position with Bonzai 3D.

Thanks for all your plug-ins. Whenever I need to be productive and find basic functionality like this that isn't in Sketchup, I just Google "Chris Fullmer tool"

Thanks again.

This is an excellent first pass at this scene, I think. Particularly well-done is the chandelier scene upper left. You might reduce the glow of that light somewhat to achieve a more subtle variation of light in that room.

If this shot suffers from anything it might be a lack of a central focus. Everything is lit so evenly across the entirety of the scene that the eyes are pulled everywhere across the scene. Sometimes this is done on purpose; but many times it is better to think of your photograph as telling a story and every story has a central theme to it.

Pick a focal point of each scene and then light everything to push the viewers eye to that focal point.

The pool is lit well, but suffers from lack of obvious geometry to support the light. You might throw in some geometry representing the light sources throwing those rays to increase believeability.

The track lights and sconces are very well done. I would tone down the tube lighting falling down the rock wall just to create some better ambience and this will tend to help focus your scene on the room central to the photograph.

There is also a distracting light source in the window to the left of the pool area that is pulling the eye needlessly away from your central focus. I'd tone down that strength.

The lighting in the main room is generally well-done for a first pass, but two things stand out to me:

1. The reflection of light on the left wall (where the orange art hanging is) seems much too strong given the obvious light sources in the room. This is also true of the back wall. Tone those area lights down a bit. You want to try to avoid large areas of 100% white as this makes the scene look washed out.

Finally, the "globe" lamps in the main room over the chairs have holes in the bottoms of them. I think you should maybe put a spot light inside each of those lamps so that a halo of light appears on the floor. Most of the light photons that escape those lamps downward are going to strike the floor under and around the chairs.

Nicely done. I'd love to see your second pass to get a flavor for how subtle changes can affect the overall scene.

Cheers,

@gaieus said:

@3dbuilder said:

...When saving a model, Sketchup should automatically purge the model of unused components and materials...

No way! I constantly work with models where I keep things only in the "browser" and such.

... this should at least be an Options option.

@gaieus said:

You have to purge your model prior to exporting/importing (Purge everything from Window > Model info > Statistics).

This is a huge unnecessary irritant that makes me curse Sketchup.

When saving a model, Sketchup should automatically purge the model of unused components and materials (this should at least be an Options option, or at a minimum the save dialogue should ask me if I'd like to purge before saving.)

I hope some Google programmers are watching this thread.

@gaieus said:

Now I had a computer with a 2.77 GHz (single core) processor, 512 Mb RAM and a 128 Mb Ati Radeon X550 card (I could not see any performance boost when HW acceleration was on).

With this, I built a model of 12+ million edges and 300K+ faces but of course, I used hidden layers a lot.

Gaieus ... thanks a lot for the benefit of your experience.

I have a Intel Core 2 Quad running at 2.83 Ghz with a (probably underpowered a little bit) nVidia 9500 512mb GPU.

My model has about 800,000 faces.

I am facing many performance issues (even with layering effectively).

Is this the experience I can expect with a model this complex?

I am taking steps to reduce model complexity and so hoping for an improvement.

Any advise would be much appreciated.

Cheers.

How big is too big?

What are the practical limits to the number of faces in a drawing (assuming say ... 2gb RAM with an nVidia 9500 mid-range 512mb graphics card)?

Is faces the biggest determinate of performance?

How large/complex can a model get before it gets unworkable?