Hey everyone. I have created a post on the sketchup community forums where I am advocating to see more development to be done to layout at a faster pace and to get trimble to create a public roadmap for sketchup/layout.
The post is currently being reviewed by managers of trimble and is going well so far. If you want to see more get done on the products we love, leave a comment on this thread here.
Oh sorry Dave lol, I didn't mean YOU, I mean anyone, from time to time I use the YOU word haha. Wasn't referring to you at all, just people in general.
DEAR SKETCHUP TEAM, I BELIEVE I HAVE A SOLUTION FOR A LARGER CRASHING PROBLEM:
First to reply to you Dave:
Dave, those are all great suggestions, I feel like I am very good at clean modelling, I am aware of everything you've said but keep saying it because as you know many people are not. You have a great suggestion about the cleaning up components outside of main model first, never heard of problems in layout because of that but I have had one experience where there was an invisible object in my layout file that me and Colin found in a session together that literally stopped my layout from exporting to PDF.
Great tip about the cleanup though, I usually use Transmutr but will keep that in mind too.
POSSIBLY VERY HELPFUL UPDATE FOR SKETCHUP TEAM:
My layout as I've written in this post was crashing non stop, I couldn't render a viewport without layout crashing nearly all of the time. I have seen a lot of comments about layout crashing so obviously Layout for years needs more attention (still). Solution for me was to stop manually rendering my viewports (termporarily this is my solution) it is a much faster and better practice to manually render viewports (as needed) as now layout is not trying to focus on a large operation with other involved vieports on a page when you only want to render one viewport one is working on, it's this reason that I always have auto render turned off, now I don't need 2d geometry representing 3d sketchup objects because I'm worried about heavy rendering operations where layout would have to render all viewports and all 3d geometry inside a layout viewport, that's why it can be useful to use 2d objects in replace of 3d in layout but you can avoid all of this and have a beautiful 3d presentation with layout by turning off auto render. Anyways, when you turn auto render off, possibly as long as I have had it off it was the exact cause of my problem relating to rendering. When I turned auto render back on and adjusted scenes in layout viewports or adjust viewports all together I haven't had one crash since, it's been 2 straight hours now, all day it's been crashing every 5 mins. I think this is possibly an obvious tip that is causing a lot of grief for crashes. I have no idea how the back end works in the coding but I don't know if it's some kind of large cache being built up or something like that beacuse one has auto render off for too many rendering actions, forgive me if I just soudned like an idiot ( I know nothing about the back end of developing or programming ). Anyways problem is solved, this is obvious. My new dell xps 17 had exact same problem until I turned auto render back on (the tick box checked). I even tried daves solution where he mentioned in another post to try another layout file an older one and mess with teh rendering and see if it crashes, it crashed with every single test regardless of file size, file, etc.
Thanks for your help Dave. I would also lastly say that if you are having trouble with layout or sketchup, stop for a moment and take more of an investigator approach, test things out, test different models, etc., I never used to do this but a session with Colin on the sketchup team showed me this on a few problems he's helped me troubleshoot and the result is more than not I get to start work again, so if anyone has problems with a program, try to remind yourself to be more creative with your problem solving, wish I thought that way years ago but such is life, we only have 1 life to make so many mistakes, ha.
SICK!! This is awesome! I constantly see pro sketchup users trying to get away with the orbit hotkeys or the orbit key on a mouse but it's not nearly as fast to navigate or draw objects in a model as the setup you're showing in the photo. One of the biggest reasons is if the mouse in your right hand is an MMO mouse with 12 buttons on the side for example, you can use the spacemouse to hotkey combo pair it with like 100+ hotkeys. Another big disadvantage of using the button on a mouse to orbit is that now it's tough to hit any of the 12 buttons quickly and easily, I literally swing around a model and am already pressing new tools while orbiting and drawing at the same time since I don't have to press a middle mouse button or something like that because I have a spacemouse for my left to orbit. I currently use 40 hotkeys in my workflow and my right and left hand don't leave my spacemouse or my mouse at all to touch the keyboard while combo pressing any of the 40 plugin hotkeys when I need a tool. I am insanely fast at modelling due to this setup in comparison to typical previous setups I've tried. I definitely need something like this. Not enough people do the setup I'm referring to that I do so I think this might be a challenge as you are marketing a setup that isn't super common among sketchup users and pros as well (in my experience).
I would suggest adding another photo in there and showing in the left hand like a mini keyboard the 1-9 keys or whatever so people could use that as a hotkey pad and maybe change the mouse photo on the right to an MMO mouse with 12 buttons on the inside like the one I mentioned I use (I think this visual would give people ideas to more closely adopt the setup you're showing in the photo).
Love the product idea though. Will check out the kick starter.
Wondering what's going on here. I know Layout is not the most reliable for a lot of people including me, but I'm really not sure how this has been so bad today. Sounds like there is a potential bug when it comes to Layout rendering or something like that lately.. Yea anyways the program has crashed on me nearly 20 times now. I've restarted, I have a powerful system, radeon rx 580, 40gb ram, 8700k coffee lake cpu, etc. I wonder if my next graphics card should be a nvidia, that's what I have on my dell xps 17 laptop but for my desktop I have a radeon rx580. Any thoughts, especially if my card relates to the crashing? Never seen this before though so I'm quite confused, again I think there is some kind of bug I read about recently with Layout that the team is trying to fix..