lots of jaggiesApologies for not uploading a file previously. The problem resurfaced on a new machine. I've attached a small subset of the model with the same rendering issue.
Thx
Sketchup Pro 2013
The screen quality of a 28MB model I'm working on just went bad. It went from clean edges to jaggies all over the place with edges that should be hidden, exposed. No changes were made to the OpenGL settings, or other settings of any kind. I had just placed a section plane. It's as if the model exceeded SU's capacity for rendering. This happened to me on the same model and others before, but on an older laptop with Intel integrated graphics. In response I bought a new laptop with the following specs.
i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.4GHz
16GB ram
NVIDIS GeForce GT750M, with the latest driver: 9.18.13.2049 (openGL compatible). The NVIDIA control panel is set for application control of anti-aliasing.
With this new machine, prior to the current breakdown, the image quality was good, though there was some aliasing at close zoom. Other, smaller models displayed with excellent quality with no or extremely little aliasing at zoom.
SU installed with these OpenGL settings:
Hardware acceleration checked,
Use fast feedback checked,
#63, True Color Medium, Shadows=Yes, anti-aliasing = 0x.
I changed this to setting:
#40, True Color Medium, Shadows=Yes, anti-aliasing = 4x.
Despite the anti-aliasing difference there was no improvement in the display.
Oddly enough, once I had selected #40, #63 was no longer available. It disappeared from the available options. When I unchecked hardware acceleration and restarted, settings #101 and #102 became available, both with 0x anti-aliasing. Neither worked well. Upon rechecking hardware acceleration, setting #63 (shadows) made a reappearance along with #13 (no shadows). Neither selection helped the display, though selecting #13 made #63 disappear again. I chose setting #40 for want of anything better.
The OpenGL settings dialog is kind of a black box in which selection results don't seem to make any logical sense. It's like turning your car steering wheel right, but continuing straight, or maybe turning left. I have no idea what maximum texture size does. It had no effect on my display whatsoever.
Now for the oddest behavior.
Having some experience with this in the past with my old laptop, but with SU8 Pro, I tried a strategy that I've had success with. I selected a component of the large problem model (LPM) and did a save-as. I closed SU, then opened the saved skp file. This subset of the large model, was only 8.5MB. I hypothesized that if the LPM had exceeded some king of SU limit, this small problem model (SPM) should be well under that limit and render properly. As in the past, this was not the case. The SPM rendered with the same jaggies, exposed hidden lines and general visual mayhem as the large model had. So much for the exceeding limits hypothesis.
With the old machine I discovered that if you import a problem model into a working model, the problem goes away. So, I closed the SPM, created a new model, then imported the SPM into it. As expected, it displayed as it should. No jaggies, no weird behavior. The problem disappeared.
If it worked for the SMP it should work for the LPM, and it did. I imported the LPM into a new model and it displayed fine. That's all well and fine, but the question is why?
I believe I can conclude that:
- because I've observed this behavior on two very different systems, the problem is not hardware related.
- because the exported SPM had the same problems as the LPM, it's unlikely that a SU capacity was exceeded.
- if the capacity of SU wasn't exceeded, and it's not a hardware issue, it could be a corrupted file.
If it's a corruption problem, what would have caused it? In this case, nothing had changed with any settings, or on the model. I had just placed a section plane when the display went wonky, though I had recently placed many section planes without any problems.
Has anyone else had this experience?