@valerostudio said:

Is anyone still fuming over this? I am trying to get site information for a model and SketchUp was always the go to. Now I don't know what the heck to do. These topo models that import from DG are useless. The grid is WAY to spread out. In some cases 100-200' grid. That's ridiculous.

Yes.

I went the revit route, mentioned previously here and in other threads. It worked but it was very frustrating. It bloated my model and I had to sit through dozens of spinning wheels. For example, here is an area of a site I modeled that had just enough slope that I didn't have time to clean it up:

The old way would have been a piece of cake with hundreds of entities. This one, x 4 acres, was a real strain on my computer.

Thanks for the link. Guess I wasn't using the right search terms.

Crap indeed. I tried the revit importer-to-revit-to-sketchup work around and it bloated my model from 11mb to 76mb. Since I didn't have time to experiment with other options I had power through it.

I told the higher-ups until I find another route, models requiring heavy terrain work will either have poor accuracy or will require a topo survey. Since topo's are rarely handed out with requests for proposals it looks like we're going with poor accuracy.

I'm surprised this hasn't been brought up before but I can't find anything. So here goes...

Sketchup's new geo-location imagery and topography is of such a low quality that it is essentially unusable now. The first image below is from an old model using 2015 Pro. The second image is the same location in 2017 Pro.

It's zoomed in as far as it can and I don't see any other options in the geo-location menu. Are there other setting somewhere or another way to import better quality images and topo info?

Thanks in advance

@notareal said:

If GPU rendering with Thea is in your interest, pick one that has GeForce 700M series GPU, more RAM and CUDA cores on GPU the better... otherwise macbooks are my favorite (and you naturally can run Linux or Windows on those too )

This gets at the heart of my dilemma. I do need the GPU power for walkthrough's and the occasional away from the office rendering but I don't think I need it enough to justify the price (either way I can't afford a $2k+ machine). So if I'm looking at the 600 series cards then macbooks are looking like the best contenders at my price range.

@unknownuser said:

i think anybody contemplating a laptop right now should hold out a few months til the intel iris pro gpus start showing up in machines which no longer will offer discreet cards as well..

This sounds promising but I can't wait a few months. I need a laptop in hand by September.

Thanks for the tips guys. This has been extremely helpful.

Thanks Mike. I actually bookmarked your post about macbooks being the best windows machines. I think mackbooks will be the benchmark to beat. I feel similarly about the Retina display; It's great but I'll skip it if I can get the same spec machine cheaper.

For comparison, this is what republic of gamers gives you for the same price; ASUS G75VW-RH71 17.3 LED Notebook Intel Core i7-3630QM 2.4 GHz 12GB DDR3 750GB HDD DVD SuperMulti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670M Windows 8 Black

Some specs are better and some are worse. It will probably come down to the little details. For example I hate windows 8 & a 17.3" laptop is too big for what I need. I'll keep hunting.

This thread should be old enough that I can "slightly" expand it...

Like the OP, I'm in the market for a new laptop, however my budget is ~$1600 (preferably lower). Having had good experiences at work with a less than 1 year old "republic of gamers" ASUS laptop I figured I would start there...

Those machines start at ~$1200 and go way up from there. At those prices Macbooks become competitive. I don't want to start a mac vs pc war but if I'm going to spend that much on a laptop should I just get a macbook? I've only used pc's professionally but I am familiar enough with mac's that I'm not against the idea of getting one.

I haven't searched much yet but I imagine there are better deals out there than gamer branded machines. Any links, recommendations, tips would be appreciated.

Oh and this machine would be used similarly to the OP's; outside office presentations using sketchup and lightup. I'd probably put thea on there at some point too. Thanks.

Sorry I can't help either. I only know where it is not how to do it.

Nor am I familiar with gimp. My firm forces me to use CS2

I think he's refereing to this one (about halfway down the page):
http://www.sketchupartists.org/presentations/techniques/

Reminds me of a post on pushpullbar; http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/showthread.php?13868-Stolen-project

To summerize; someone applied for a job with a cv which included a project he stole from the firm he was applying to! [can't find an emoticon which expresses what I feel when I read about it]

Thanks Paul. I agree, I have yet to find a better workflow than SU + (insert your favorite image editor here).

@pbacot said:

Don't you love this business? Don't expect any thanks or recognition from the boss for all the training, hardware, and software you provide for yourself .

Don't get me started. I know that I could make equivalent or more money and work much less than I do now doing something else, but, like a wife constantly returning to her abusive husband, I hang in there.

Thanks for the comments. Keep 'em 'comin...

As my transition from 'quiet guy in the corner' to 'participating member' continues I thought it was about time to start sharing some of my works.

When the firm I started at earlier this year refused to buy Piranesi for me and wanted me to use Photoshop, I thought I was screwed. I used Photoshop in school but have only used it for basic cropping, resizing, etc over the past 6+ years. So in my first few weeks I spent my nights and weekends scouring the internet and practicing on old school projects. This is one of those practice runs.

I did this project in school, it's a cancer treatment center with a huge and complex program on a tiny site. The focus of that semester was on the program and floor plans but I think the design came out ok too.

These images were made with a few sketchup exports (lines only, color only, shadows only, x-ray) overlayed on top of each other in Photoshop and tweaked until I was happy. Since these were just practice runs I skimped out on the boring stuff like blending or selecting so there are some issues with that. But for the most part I'm happy with them considering they took less time to produce than to export them from sketchup. Also I have a personal preference for vintage, toy camera, steam punk etc type styles so I often lean that direction or include it as an alternate.

Thanks for viewing. Comments and critiques are welcome.

Not sure how much you could call this advice but...

I've also experienced similar issues with prints looking dull, being the wrong colors, etc. I calibrated the monitors and printers to have the same color profiles and still nothing. Then one day my boss said, (I'm paraphrasing and removing the many explatives) We can't afford to print things a million times anymore. What comes out is what we show.

After several months of slowely tweeking little settings here and there I think I'm headed in the right direction. So far I'm using a tweeked RGB profile on a CMYK printer and a CMYK plotter. Until the company decides to buy a plotter that's younger than me I think I'll have to continue doing it this way. Perhaps trial and error is your only option too. Even if it takes months.

sorry I almost forgot; Very nice images. Thanks for posting.

Anything by this guy;
http://www.giantmonster.tv/giant/
Specifically;
http://www.giantmonster.tv/giant/?page_id=612

These images are produced mostly in sketchup. He used to have a great wealth of info regarding this project on his blog, including tuts, workflows, etc. But as time went on it has moved to the back burner and the amount of info has decreased, but I still find it very inspirational.

He also used to have some videos on youtube showing his sketchup workflow. I forget what they were called but they're a good watch.