Posts made by AirWindSolar

Seems to be happening to a few others this morning too.
SUPro2014 on Win8.1, but hearing of at least one Mac user having the same problem.

@mac1 said:

Since you have( or will have) 8GB of RAM I assume you have a 64 bit machine.

Correct; it's Win8.1 64 bit, and the CPU is an AMD quad core at 3.8GHz. Since I usually have a couple of SU instances and few other things open at the same time (browser for CRM, Google Earth, and sometimes Kerkythea) it's not like the other cores are just sitting around bored and wishing they could play with SU too.
Performance is already noticeably better, though there's certainly still room for improvement. Hopefully the SSD will provide a fair bit when it comes in. Kerkythea is already dramatically better; even running only two threads while I'm editing a fairly large model at the same time, it's farther along a fairly complex MLT render after 36 minutes than it would have been in 2 hours on the old machine.

@rich o brien said:

AMD cards are notoriously SU unfriendly.

Don't you mean SU is notoriously AMD card unfriendly?

Unfortunately, for the initial purchase I'm stuck with only a few package options. Going to a desktop, however, means that I'm not nearly as limited when it comes to upgrading. (And that I have an excuse not to haul stuff home unless they want to spring for another laptop and another SU Pro license. )

@rich o brien said:

Good CPU and GPU with adequate RAM.

If it's a laptop you should get a dedicated nVidia GPU.

I'll be switching from the dual core 2.66GHz laptop with 4G RAM to a quad core 3.6GHz desktop with (initially) 8G RAM and a Radeon with 2G VRAM, so hopefully that will help. Need to talk the boss into adding a fair size SSD to it soon, too.

I know part of the problem is the other stuff I pretty much always have open, so maybe having a couple more cores and stuffing more memory in there will get it all reasonable.

I've been having problems with SU dragging pretty badly with lots of instances of even really simple components. For example, 200+ instances of a solar panel. I tried ditching the render-ready one I was using and instead importing just a simple box textured with solid colors. It still lags 10 seconds or more trying to copy a row of them once I have more than about 50 in the model.

I'm assuming part of the problem is the old Dell Latitude E6400 I'm using for most of this, and it will be replaced soon, but what is the most important thing, hardware-wise, to eliminate delays like this?

@jeff hammond said:

dale (whaat) prices them 'right'.. $10, 20, 40 range.. i could see some plugins up in the $2-300 range, especially if they work well, but really-- anything beyond that is just not going to sell.

The problem there is that they add up quickly, and a lot of them are doing things that really should have been base SU functionality. (Add Centerpoint, Selection Toys and Purge come screaming to mind.) I wouldn't want to explain to the boss why I'm wearing out the company credit card on $10-20 extensions to do fairly basic stuff.

Then there's the separate issue of frequency of use; I probably have a couple of dozen plugins downloaded that I use maybe once a month, if that.

@luca vidotto said:

Useful comment AirWindSolar. You say "limited use on about 20% of our projects, being an excellent solution for about 2-3%, and pretty much pointless on the rest." I would like to understand why it's pointless provide a 3D presentation or a configurator to clients. It may be a ROI (return on investment) problem?

For the vast majority of our projects, there's just not a demand. I'd say around half don't even get a model that goes beyond dropping the components onto the satellite view of the property. It's only on the larger ones or the occasional personal challenge that the sales reps are going to dedicate the time to get me the extra measurements and other site info to model out the site and proposed systems to that level of detail.

For the most part, the construction stage amounts to having our guys fabricate trusses in-house, precut everything except the uprights, and then the onsite crew is just pouring footers, setting the posts plumb, trimming them level and assembling the rest of the structure from a fairly simple 4-5 page Layout document.

Except for those big ones, I just can't clear the time to add much detail to jobs, and those just aren't frequent enough to justify an ongoing monthly cost for more software that will add even more time to the process.

@mike lucey said:

Forget 64-bit, we're now talking about straight to 128-Bit

Unfortunately, they're special bits; instead of 0 and 1, their states are sqrt(2) and pi.

More unfortunately, the emulator needed only runs under NeXTSTEP 2.2.

@andrews said:

Obviously these sorts of statements seem ridiculous in retrospect, but the thing is that one never really knows which assumptions will hold true and which ones won't back when the original decisions are made.

The safe bet is generally not to artificially limit things when it comes to computers. I had a 40MB full height MFM drive. I remember installing and formatting the first 400MB drive in my city. I also remember seeing the first 1GB drive come through that shop and wondering just what the heck they were going to put on that monster. Now I don't leave the house without a 32GB flash drive in my pocket and a 32GB MicroSD in my phone. Nearly every one of these devices, at its introduction, had to have some sort of workarounds for limitations in the major OS of the time, because the developers had assumed that no one would ever use that much storage.

Of course, an even more helpful approach would be to waterboard developers when they add bloat. I remember using an 8086 and 5.25" floppies to do a lot of things that now require a CD full of software and are far from instantaneous on a 2.4GHz CPU.

I could see it having limited use on about 20% of our projects, being an excellent solution for about 2-3%, and pretty much pointless on the rest.

Therein lies the rub when it comes to a subscription; it's far from the only subscription-based service that would be useful at times, and those payments add up when you have a lot of them. It also means there might be months where we hardly touch it at all, but still end up paying full price for it.

@pixero said:

A worrying thing is that it seems they haven't even started converting to 64 bit to future proof SU.

But you'll never need more than 640k, applications will never be too big for a handful of 720k floppies, or manage to fill up a 40MB hard drive, or...

@pbacot said:

You'd never make it in remodel. You'd go nuts cause nothing is square, lines-up, or even fits (sometimes).

Imagine working solar array design with a guy who insists on trying to wedge modules into a space with less than an inch of tolerance, then throws a tantrum when it won't work because his sales rep that did the site eval was a foot or more off with the measurements.

Takes about a half dozen of them from the same rep before the tantrum can be redirected at the "poor overburdened" sales rep, too. Never mind that most of them are now hauling around $2-300 worth of just measuring equipment, (measuring wheel, digital measure, etc.) and the install crew is able to get excellent measurements with a $20 tape measure.

@jeff hammond said:

• high volume cafe/coffee house..
• one of those "i don't know - what do you want to build?" setups
• i want to build this

From an ergonomic (and potentially ADA) standpoint, long benches suck for folks with knee and/or hip injuries, since being anywhere other than the end basically means they're trapped in there until everybody else moves.

Then again, cramped and uncomfortable is the in thing for coffee shops these days.

@jeff hammond said:

up to now, the stance is pretty much "if you want sketchup to be 64bit then too bad"

You forgot the part about "shut up and give us money annually for ignoring you. If we're feeling really generous, we'll give you a little tiny bit of what you paid for in the first place, eventually."

@solemassoud said:

I have been using Skelion pro for a few months and it is a great tool. lately the 'sunny area' (Moon icon) calculation tool doesn't seem to work. I normally check for shaded surfaces before laying out the panels.

Same here, even on a relatively simple model (single triangular face of a pitched roof with a chimney) it gets to "step 1 of 6" and then bug splats.

Also, would love to see it add something to specify an "acceptable" shade level, since sometimes on these systems we're using microinverters, and will tolerate an hour of shade on each panel, but obviously want to avoid panels that would be shaded 3-4 hours a day where possible. Maybe two separate indications of shadow to show unshaded all day, shaded within the tolerance, and shaded beyond the tolerance.

EDIT TO ADD: Tried it again on one iteration, and it ran, but of course only gave the single shadow. Tries at 2 or 3 iterations crashed. "Join shadows" or not had no effect. Narrowing the time frame to 1000-1500 didn't help either. Changing to June 21 instead of December 21 did allow it to run a 2 iteration without joining shadows, but it failed again when I tried it with 0900-1600.

Powell.skp

@dave r said:

Joe, how did the component axes get set so far away from the geometry? Makes you wonder, don't it?

At a guess, that subcomponent was probably part of something else, which was then mostly deleted and then saved/imported into the new component.

IIRC, the worst one I've seen was a lamppost from the warehouse that was a couple hundred feet from the origin. I figure somebody had a street scene, then deleted everything but the lamppost and did a save as.

@mitcorb said:

If the IE cache situation becomes persistent, you can, on Windows make a shortcut for "inetcpl.cpl"
This is the file for the Internet Options UI. From here, you can clear your cache if you do not use the normal method, or CCleaner.

Forgot about CCleaner. That saves me having to actually open IE again.

Internet Explorer's motto should be "the most popular browser for downloading Chrome."

@dave r said:

If you just work in Monochrome mode in the first place and fix face orientation as you go, you shouldn't need to be bouncing between face styles anyway.

Problem is I have idiots over my shoulder all the time, so everything has to be color coded right away to reduce the "what size is that?" interruptions.

That helps a lot. Now I just need a quicker way to switch; I generally use just shaded w/texture, hidden line, and now "backface finder," and it would be really handy if I could cycle through those with a toolbar button or something, without having to keep the style window open among the clutter on my other screen.

Sometimes I miss a reversed face during modeling, and sometimes stuff from the Warehouse turns out to have a few buried under full texturing. Of course, Kerkythea hates that, but they're hard to find without removing all the textures and looking everywhere.

Is there a way to go to something like the hidden line face style with the reversed faces highlighted in a more visible way than the blue that can be easily lost in a complex model? Ideally, a plugin to toggle and change the hidden face color to something user selectable would be most helpful. So far, rolling over it repeatedly with the Front Face plugin and using Material Tools to clear materials from back faces have been helpful, but not as fast as being able to, say, have the model go white and show all the back faces in bright red would be.