@solo said:

Not really a texture size in dimesions as much as it's size in kb. Are they all jpg, or png?
How many different textures?

There are about 60 different textures.
Most of them are.png but there all also jpegs.
I thought that on sketchup it loads them as bitmaps so the size of files doesn't matter.
Do you think I should change them to jpeg?

I run the script to remove all the materials and the model is about 8MB in size now and runs smoothly.
Do you believe it's because of the materials?
Some of the materials are about 1000x1000 and some others about 750x750
Are these sizes too big? should I scale them down a bit?
Is there any way to search if there is some specific material that causes the problems?

It's almost impossible to work without hardware acceleration on this model. Orbiting is really slow.

For the record the size of the model right now is 200MB. It's an area of 180 sq.Km. with 30+ buildings on it with many details on each of them.

Edges 640182
Faces 133686
Component instances 5133

@solo said:

I suspect the models that are crashing have large/heavy textures right?

All the textures applied have been re sized to a 10-25% of their original file size. Average ~800x600

@thomthom said:

Crashing while modelling:
Any kind of model?
Have you purged the model?
Have you tried to disable hardware acceleration? (often problems can occur due to a bad graphic card driver.)
What graphic card do you got?
Does it crash while modelling when VfSU is not installed?

Not any model just this one that is really big
Yes the model is purged though it crashed also sometimes while purging
No will try disabling hardware acceleration
Geforce 9600 GT
Didn't try without VfSU

@thomthom said:

First of all, what version do you use? (this is important as the behaviour of VfSU differ greatly depending on what version you're using.)

Vray v.01.05.30

@thomthom said:

Sketchup crashes while modelling, or it crashes while rendering?

Both!
It can crash even right after I open the model and just try to orbit a bit.
Generally it crashes all the time without any apparent reason. Or something specific that I have found out at least.
Some examples:
1.Applied new material, crashes upon opening, barely managed to keep it open long enough to remove it. Material had been checked prior to applying in different file and worked fine. Anyways, problem solved.
2. Save. Bug Splat. From one point on without anything different being done. I simply can not press save without it crashing. Restarting the program several times as well as the pc does the trick eventually.
3. Casually working on the model. Lines, move and other basic orders. Crash. For no reason.
4. Rendering. Of course this is my favorite. At least it makes some sense since it's the one moment I expect it to perform at its highest and perhaps there are a bunch of problems from memory loss, to bugs in vray, to overheating or whatever. But it crashes once more.
What's most interesting to me is that if I keep trying to do sth that makes it crash, it's eventually successful though I don't change any setting or whatever.

I know that in order for vray to render correctly it has to have the faces in groups.
Since I have a pretty big model (about 200MB with the vray materials) and it's quite hard to do all the faces manually do you know if there is plugin that can do that for me?

p.s. Sketchup keeps crushing all the time and I bet it's because of the size of the model. Any possible tips for that?

@thomthom said:

Have you checked out the Arroway FAQ? http://www.arroway-textures.com/en/faq/14

yes that's where I copied and the 2 lines on my first post.

Thanks very much for the quick answer!

Can someone help me with the values on the reflection maps on arroway textures?

On their site they say :

s050: "The specularity map; the recommended strength is 50%."

(g025) "Instead of a map, you may specify a fixed glossiness value of 25%."

So if I just want to use the second option and I have a material with g100 I just add a reflection layer which by default has Highlight Glossiness and Reflection Glossiness 1?

but what happens when the value is g025?

also what about the specular map? where do I load that? On the Maps at the reflection? or somewhere inside the reflection layer options?

Thanx in advance

@thomthom said:

Are their normals flipped? If you set the style to use the default colour only, what does it look like then?

the faces are right. I see the white side.

I tried that copy part of the model to a new file so I can post it here and when I tried a test render there it renders just fine!
I'm trying to figure out if there is any other geometry that causes this problem now.
I'll be back with any news