I'm late to the party on this one, but I've been detailing in SU since version 2 (20 years ago!) and layout since it's first iteration (which was tedious). I've found that I tend to go down a dual route, depending on what level of competence I have in the contractor and/or the complexity of the build.
I Scrapbook most of my standard details which are small SU files in the same folder as the Sketchbooks. This makes a lot of them nicely lightweight in LayOut too, and if there's a change in legislation I change the Scrapbook file accordingly.

@fakebob said:

Oh, my! I'm sorry to have wasted your time, but I read the log file and realised I am using my laptop which has a Radeon RX 5500M graphics card...... which is not CUDA compliant. I should have read the documentation first!

I'll chalk this up to ignorance, and hope there's an Radeon RX version in the future (pretty please!)!

An update, the plot thickens.

So my laptop has 2 graphics cards, an AMD Ryzen integrated and a Radeon RX 5500M that I run my external monitor on. In the interest of sound technical reasoning, I updated my graphics driver software (Adrenalin) to the latest version (24.1.1, released on 11/1/24), did a full reboot, etc. and then got sketchup open. It worked!

And the crashing on picking a material also stopped happening, (even though it did take a little time to get going for some reason).

So, moral of the story: if you're having crashes, update your graphics card software to the latest version first and see if it still happens.

I am getting a message in the log:

2024-02-04 08:07:38.919 (1293.107s) [PreProcessWorker] ERR| OIDN device creation failed: invalid physical device ID: 1
2024-02-04 08:07:38.919 (1293.107s) [PreProcessWorker] ERR| Failed to create the open image denoiser, disabling AI denoise.

What's that all about?

I'm gonna go play with this now!

Hi! This software shows so much promise! I'm excited more than when I first got kerkythea waaaaay back.

I downloaded the newest alpha 0.8.4 today because the 0.8.3 one just crashed my 2023 sketchup pro on either:
a) adding a sketchup texture/colour to a face or
b) opening the Rayscaper Start Render screen (it pops up then everything crashes)

Is anyone else having the same issue? I removed the previous version before installing the update.

Bob