I am experiencing two serious problems with Sketchup, resulting in frequent program hangs and crashes. I am really tearing my hair out over this now. I am unsure if the problems are related but I will describe both here in case they are:
1. Program hangs
I generally have no problems during basic modelling and applying materials. I am a garden designer, and I need to include a relatively large number of plants in my models and I almost exclusively use 2D 'face-me' components. I make extensive use of the CADPlants libraries together with some components from other sources.
Problems start during this process, when I find that having inserted numerous components without any issue, I click to select a new one from the component window (from my local library) and immediately get the 'wait' colour wheel. At this point the program has hung. I have waited 15 minutes and the software will never recover. I have to Force-Quit and start again, from a recent save or AutoSave.
Perhaps I am just expecting too much of the software and/or hardware?
The behaviour occurs in SU8 on both my iMac and Mac Book Pro (specs etc below).
It is not model specific.
It is not component specific (i.e. Any individual component may or may not cause the issue).
Troubleshooting already performed:
Purging model
Repairing model (no errors are ever found)
Running SU with no plugins (by temporarily renaming the Plugin folder)
As a workaround, I have had some success copying the surface on which I am placing the plant components to a new blank drawing (using Paste In Place). I then put the required plants on this surface, group them and copy-paste them back to the main model. I can often get 10 or 20 new components into the model this way. Occasionally it will cause SU to bomb out completely as I paste them in. I am having to add plants to renders in Photoshop instead, with less satisfactory results.
I am not sure if it is just the quantity of face-me components or the textures that is resulting in the problems. A recent model that was particularly troublesome was 133MB in size on disk, with the following 'Entire Model' statistics including nested components:
Edges: 68966
Faces: 4490
Component Instances: 304
Groups: 53
Component Definitions: 90
Layers: 22
Materials: 111
Styles: 1
All other items on the list are 0.
I can provide a link to download this model if anyone cares to inspect it, but I do not want to post it publicly. PM me for link and password.
2. Shaderlight render crashes
Shaderlight will regularly cause SU8 to crash, shortly after hitting the 'Render' button. I am usually using the SU Lighting environment. Sometimes I use Moofe or Preset. I don't think it matters as far as the potential to crash goes. I am going to post about this direct to Shaderlight as well.
Edit: Error log files added in case anyone understand them - I don't!
System Info:
iMac – Late 2011
3.4GHz i7, 16GB RAM, OS X 10.8.3, Radeon 6970M 1024MB
Mac Book Pro
2.5GHz i7, 16GB RAM, OS X 10.8.3, Intel HD Graphics 3000 512MB
Both Systems:
SU Pro 8.0.16845
Error log files