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.
