@plot-paris said:

didn't know that. but just tried it out and you are right! wonderful!

another thought: we have to ask people who do the test to shut down all other software. otherwise the results may be influenced negatively...

[Edit] and yet another thought: does all the grafical calculations like styles and shadows solely depend on the gpu? meaning that the cpu only has to calculate any geometry modifications. can't you seperate the processes like this?
(sorry if this question sounds stupid. but I have no idea of how such things work... )

That's pretty much my understanding. I've been running my own benchmarks lately using a model I did that's 3.3MB. In the ruby console I run Test.time_display and it'll rotate around your model 360 degrees in exactly 72 frames. Afterwords it gives you a little report w/ some useful info. I'm finding it very handy to see exactly what kind of performance hits SU takes from tweaking various things (clock speed, resolution, hardware acceleration, fast feedback, anti-aliasing, etc.). I write down my settings and then run 4 tests (all 4 combos of textures on/off & shadows on/off).

I'm running on a 3.4Ghz Intel Pentium 4 HT w/ 2 gigs of RAM and an nVidia 8800GT graphics card at 1600x1200 resolution.

Here are just a couple results which should address your question.

Hardware Accel. turned ON in SU.
Textures: OFF
Shadows: OFF
23.3 frames/second

Textures: OFF
Shadows: ON
1.2 frames/second

Textures: ON
Shadows: OFF
18.6 frames/second

Textures: ON
Shadows: ON
1.1 frames/second

Hardware Accel. turned OFF in SU.
Textures: OFF
Shadows: OFF
7.2 frames/second

Textures: OFF
Shadows: ON
0.2 frames/second

At this point I stopped testing w/ hardware accel turned off because that last test took almost 7 minutes, whereas the other one's were either taking about 4 seconds (w/ shadows off) up to a minute (w/ shadows on).

Before doing this test I'd heard that the graphics card basically just does shadows and textures while the CPU does the geometry. Nevertheless, unless I'm missing something (?) the graphics card helps out a ton even w/o textures and shadows turned on.

-Brodie

@plot-paris said:

I just spotted a problem (I think). how much do components affect cpu and ram? because the file size should be rather small for fast download - therefore should consist of components... but can we test all necessary information with that?

Not entirely sure what the question is but my understanding is that components will make the saved file quite a bit smaller, however once the drawing is open they make no difference whatsoever in terms of fps.

-Brodie

that sounds like fun

no, not on a mac. any idea where/what to edit in there? I didn't find any posts about it.

-Brodie

I didn't find an answer to this under the search menu so hopefully there's a solution. I have multiple displays and just changed my graphics card. Now all of my dialog boxes seem to be appearing somewhere off screen and I can't find a way to get them back. Any options?

I have an nVidia 8800 if that matters.

-Brodie

Speak for yourselves. Give us info! Some things are more important than sleep (me for instance).

j/k...sort of

-Brodie

Pretty frequently I seem to run into this issue where I have some geometry that looks like it should be a 2d rectangle but it won't create a surface. It's as if the rectangle isn't perfectly flat or something because many times I'm able to sort of fake it by drawing a line between opposite corners (so it makes 2 triangles). Anyone know a better way to fix this?

-Brodie

Nothing new, but more of a reitteration based on my findings which have mainly been w/ the brick textures.

Image resolution does help but it seems to be on a decreasing scale. So rendering small images will make the affect horrible. If you do images about the size of your monitor it'll be quite a bit better. But after you get past about 2000 pixels in either width or height it doesn't seem to make as much difference.

The biggest difference comes from changing the scale. Make the scale as large as you can without making it so big it's obvious the scale is way off. This is also a much better option for animations since you don't want to just try and solve the problem by making ginormous image files.

I haven't really tested it much but it seems logical that you'd want to use .png or tiff files since they aren't compressed like a jpg.

I usually combine all of these things. Scale the texture up, have SU render a bunch of png files at 29.97 fps at a nice big size (twice the size I'll end up with is pretty ideal), then use Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 to put them into an animation.

-Brodie

@remus said:

What software do you use to render your animations? if it supports mu;tiple cores it would be well worth looking into getting a dual or even quad core processor, althugh this is a fairly major upgrade as it would mean youd need a new motherboard. Youd probably be beter of just getting a new macine if you do decide to upgrade the processor.

In terms of grahics cards, id recomend an nVidia 7000 seires card.

I'm using Adobe Premeire Elements 4.0 to compile a list of .png files that SU renders.

Here's a test I did last weekend to create what I'm considering an ideal rendering for my purposes...

1. Render 2048x1536 .png files at 29.97 fps.
   Render time: 20 hours
   This created 1982 .png files at a total size of 4.9 gigs

This was based off of a complete model but I only rendered 1/3 of the scenes so a full project rendering would be 60 hours

2. Adobe Premiere Elements 4
   I haven't compiled the images into an avi file yet but in my previous tests a 10hr. render time in SU translated into a 2hr render time in APE4. So I'm presumably looking at 12hrs.

I'm not sure if APE4 supports multiple cores.

-Brodie

@remus said:

If you want to be able to render animations quickly, yes you will definetly need a powerful processor.

Right now I've got a Pentium 4 HT 3.4GHz. I don't know a lot about hardware but I think that's pretty dec right?

The thing is I know I need a new card because the one I've got now is just not working right w/ SU. I'm wondering if I should just be fine w/ a mid-range NVidia or if I should go high-range. If the card doesn't really matter for the animation renderings then I'll save some $$$ and maybe look into a better processor later on.

-Brodie

@remus said:

Shouldnt do, as rendering is done by the CPU rather than the graphics card. I believe nVidia generally have the upper hand when it comes to graphics power anyway, might be wrong though.

So having Graphics Acceleration checked or unchecked shouldn't even affect rendering time then? The trick is to just get the best CPU I can?

-brodie

I'm using an ATI card that I've been having issues w/ in that it doesn't play well with Sketchup (slow, selecting errors, etc). If I switch to a good NVidia card do you think my animations would take a significantly less amount of time to render?

btw, my drivers and such are up to date.

-Brodie

@pixero said:

I use Vray for SketchUp at work and I get all the "old" PCs to put them in a renderfarm. Actually they are not that old and this way I can speed up rendering a LOT even on single images.
Works great.

But you have to do some work in Vray before running the animation right? I suspect if you don't mess w/ the materials and lighting and such it would look odd. I basically want the exact same sort of output that sketchup would give me.

-Brodie

I'm just getting into animation so this was extremely helpful. I've been looking for a program to use for exactly this sort of thing so I'll check out the Adobe program you mention. If that flicker thing works at all it'll be well worth the money!

I can't wait for your following tutorials!

-Brodie

This has been my experience as well. It's very difficult to get the angle to appear correctly. Sometimes if you play with it enough you can get pretty close though by eyeballing it.

What those bird's eye views are good for, however, is if you model the existing buildings and then use the arials as a texture and apply it to the faces of your model. Qualities not great (you have to use Print Screen which sux for resolution) but you usually get the whole building face which can be harder from the ground (and you don't have to actually go to the site and take pictures and hope you didn't miss anything).

-Brodie

yup, I've tweaked pretty much all of the adjustments that ATI will let me (which is surprisingly few compared to nVidia that I'm more used to). I've got anti-aliasing & anisotropic filtering set to "Use Application Settings" the only other options are Mipmap Detail level and Wait for Vertical Refresh which I've set towards the performance end of the sliding scale but adjusting those towards quality doesn't help either. That's pretty much the only options I've got in this ATI Catalyst Control Center.

-Brodie

Just gave that a shot, no luck

SU was working fine until I found out that the OpenGL box was unchecked. I checked it and contemplated the extra speed I'd be getting and the time I'd lost by not using my cards full potential w/ SU.

Now SU won't even start. I click the icon and it flashes on the screen and immediately shuts down.

ATI says the V3100 supports OpenGL 1.5 and I've installed the lastest driver (as well as two others to see if that would fix the problem).

Any ideas on how to fix this?

-Brodie

That's sort of what I figured unfortunately. Any other ideas on how to do what I'm trying to?

Thanks for the info. I guess my question, then, is can I essentially get the exact same look that my sketchup animation gives me and utilize KT's farming capabilities? That is if I just imported my sketchup model and ran an animation would it look the same as if I'd just ran the animation from sketchup or would it look different?

Basically I just want to do a sketchup animation (w/ the same sketchup 'look'), but faster, and I'm looking for any program that will let me do that.

-Brodie

I have an opportunity to "farm" multiple pc's to speed up the animation rendering process but I don't know of a good way to do this using sketchup. Is there a plug-in that would give me this ability to use the ram from multiple networked pc's?

I'm perfectly happy w/ the quality of sketchup's animation (i'm not interested in getting too deep into textures and photorealism), I just wish it were faster.