Hi Kristoff, thanks but I have been using sketchup professionally about 6 hours a day for the past couple of years, and have high spec computers both at home and at work. I commonly produce models of 5 million faces. My current model just broke 7 million with in excess of
3000 texture images on top of that. With big models like that the end phase gets a bit of a struggle. I needed to know what to upgrade. I am a designer, not a computer expert. I had an inkling of what did what, but it was good to find a source that clearly defined what does what, in the stream of processing for modelling and rendering. I basically got it right, but wish I had read that article before. It would have saved me a lot of drawn out, research work, to help me understand the nuts and bolts of it. There are lots of sometimes fragmented hardware questions asked on this forum. I was just offering a resource for people like me who want to understand the big picture in one go:)

I have been trying to get my head around hardware requirements for a while. I could not fully understand what does what. I came across this article albeit a few years old which explained and clarified this minefield of information to me. Thought I would share

How To Build A Faster 3D CAD PC

Interested in building your own 3D CAD PC? Here are the important factors to consider and a couple example builds to get you started off right!

GrabCAD Blog (blog.grabcad.com)

Thank you box: ) Beautifully and eloquently demonstrated. So simple but it had me stumped. On the same principle I now just: 'edit component' then select the component and move its centre to the axis point shown.

Thanks to all. Yes I think that may be the issue Tig. Will do some trials when I can.

Hi Guys I am exporting Skp to Dwg. When I export the dwg it is broken into line segments taking so long to edit. My stuff is fairly organic in nature therefore lots of polygons. I am thinking there is no way to join the components or groups so they end up as groups or blocks in AutoCAD but thought I would ask the question anyway. If there is it will really improve my workflow.

Cheers

Hi all, I have always had issues with keeping face me components anchored in place when I rotate the view. For instance a 2D tree, or person will pirouette around its original placement with a varying radius. This means I am always repositioning sometimes 10-20 trees or people for a particular view before I render. Is there a technique I can employ to remedy this? It would be almost life changing for my workflow.

Thanks

That may be true, but the point for me is I would think less than $200 for Pro would be about the sweet spot for me, I was using the Photoshop upgrade as an analogy. And the $700 US is for "New Single User + 1 year Maintenance & Support" by Trimble, so OK you get an out of date program to keep forever. I would be happy to pay less than $200 last year for a pro upgrade next year.

I am purchasing Photoshop this evening for a fair bit less than $200 for the next year, with updates coming in as they happen. That price hits the sweet spot for me. It is an industry standard, powerful resolved program......................enough said. I hope Trimble gets my point

Hi Guys I have been working on a large playground 2500m2. So far I have completed a couple of pockets with trees and shrubs (textures) and a number of relatively complex play structures. Each of these "pockets" is about 70Mb. I have been asked to "stitch" these pockets together and fill in with other components. The result will be a model which I expect to be around 400 Mb maybe more. I am concerned that the finished model will be to big for my computer and I may not be able to finish it. My basic computer specs are:

Cpu:Intel Core i7 4790

16 Gig of ddr3 ram

I have not yet modelled this size. Does anyone have some experience to offer an opinion on modelling something this size?

Thanks

Thanks guys.

Hi Guys, I had an issue whilst rendering ans sketchup disappeared. I could not find anything but an skb left. Can an skp file be changed to an Skp file? Little bit desperate here and on a deadline

Thank you.

Hi all every time I open SKP all my tool bars are gone and I am left with the getting started toolbar and my plugins undocked. Can someone explain a remedy?

Oh windows 7, sketchup make 2015

Cheers

Hi, I have to make some assumptions here. Import the drawing into Sketchup. there should be some known dimensions within the drawing or use the drawn scale if it has one. Measure a known distance with the tape measure. My second assumption is that you will be using metric, I would suggest millimeters, so you would import the imperial plan drawing into a metric mm template. Now scale the drawing by selecting the drawing using the 's' shortcut on your keyboard. scale by moving one of the diagonal corner points (which is uniform scale) you can either play around with the scale until you finally get your known imperial measurement and measure it so it reads in millimeters the correct conversion to millimeters. Or you can calculate the scale on your calculator and type in the scale factor directly.

So now the short version:
So forget about the 1:40 thing altogether. Say you can find some measurement in the drawing that is 10 foot then scale it so that 10 ftmeasurement reads with the tape measure as 3048mm then you have done your job and you can build from the plan without having to measure anything.

If you are drawing in imperial then simply scale the underlay drawing in an imperial drawing template till the tape measure reads correctly i.e. 10ft reads as 10ft
Cheers

Thanks guys, as it worked out I did not have a face ready for the texture......one of those Duh! moments

I am at a loss to understand why when navigating in Sketchup you are suddenly navigating trough heavy mud with the mouse and getting muscle burn with the ineffectual center wheel but as I grab my 3d Dexion "mouse" with my left hand the mud is gone and easy navigation returns. Surely this is an issue with the mouse/SKP navigation if the issue disappears with another navigation interface Surely this can be fixed in 2016