Just wanted to say a big thank you for this Plugin. Downloaded it a while ago and use it several times a week - saves me HOURS. Thanks!!

@thomthom said:

Tell the devlopers what is slow

Layout!! For me its just not up to scratch, actually not a patch on other drafting tools - but it could be!! Ive left numerous posts on this forum but have heard nothing about any ways to improve LO performance or any proposed developmental changes to make LO run better. For me this is the biggest let down and really takes away a lot of the other advantages that working with SU brings. Therefore....

@thomthom said:

Layout wasn't getting much love fro Google. Things are changing under Trimble.

This is great news! Feel like its been due for a long time.

I do get some sluggishness and crashes in SU and some bug splats so my reason for joining this thread was to try to figure out how to speed SU **AND **LO up and to see whether 64bit might be the answer. I also wanted to express my frustration at how difficult I have found it to find consensus on how to improve the performance of my current set up (without having to buy a new PC).

Granted there may be a mismatch in (users) perceived benefits of 64bit to SU (especially given that other heavy weight pro modelling apps have not managed to take advantage of it yet). So given that 64bit may not add any improvements in speeed, there still seems to be a fair amount of frustration for 'general users' on the performance of SU and LO with their farily new, fairly well spec'd machines.

@nickelessryan said:

I recently had my work machine upgraded to support the 64 bit version of AutoCAD 2013. So now I'm running a Dell Precision T1600 with Intel Xeon E31245 @3.3GHz with 8GB RAM. VAST improvements in system performance with aCAD and all other programs.

Except Sketchup.

This is the clincher for me. I know newer doesn't always mean better, but people NEED to buy new machines or upgrade their existing ones to keep up with advances and improvements in OTHER software and it seems that sometimes when they do this SU is left wanting. Some clarity on what will improve performance is all that I am trying to get - but perhaps a new thread is the best place for that. Im kind of out of my depth on the 64bit discussion but from my layman's understanding, 64bit is not the issue and will not deliver any advantage in the short term - I just need to find out what will... But I think for me, thats for another thread...

Thanks

Phew - this is doing the rounds everywhere I look! Been on the look out for how to upgrade our current studio machines to maximize performance on our core apps and Sketchup seems to be a constant block to any possible improvements. We use SU, Max 13, Adobe Creative Suite 5. The GPUs Im looking at are EITHER best for use with Max, (Nvidia) OR SU (AMD). I should point out that this is just what I have found as there is no official line from Trimble / Google / Sketchup / Developers on GPUs. Multi core is better for Max (rendering) and all of the creative suite as is 64bit but SU prefers single core and 32 bit. Its impossible to bring these two into line and its very frustrating that such a fantastic product as SU should make it so difficult to move forward and take advantage of advances in new tech.
I get that currently 64bit may not be faster and that SU only takes advantage of a single core (as does Max when modelling) but it isn't practical to expect people to have to run one older single core 32bit set up for SU and a newer 64bit multicore setup for everything else. Taking advantage of 64bit, multi core machines is the direction that everything seems to be moving in ..... except Sketchup.

Ive searched extensively for several weeks now looking for the best spec upgrades of new PC to enable our studio to work with SU and the other packages that are an essential part of my (and many others) working day / night / weekend and have so far come up with nothing. The requirements of SU seem to conflict with everything else!

For me , SU runs pretty well (some occasional crashes and stalls) but I know if I had an older 32bit single core machine it would be blazing! LO's performance quite frankly, is shocking when you hold it up to any other CAD drafting package and there is so little documentation to help me to make an informed choice on what to do to fix it!

The frustration for me is that ther seems to be a lot of speculation, missing or bad information regarding CPU and GPUs for SU and there is practically NOTHING for LO and as someone pointed out earlier there is no development path outlined anywhere so its impossible to know what direction SU will be going in and whether LO will see any (sadly lacking) development. Can't find anything to tell me if any of the upgrades Im hoping to make will have any effect on LO, and it now seems I will have to split my work between two machines to see any perofmance improvement.

The info in this page
http://support.google.com/sketchup/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=36208
is useful but there is no referene to

• single core 2+ GHz processor being better than multi - what speed multi is good as most other packages need 64bit multi to work efficiently?!?!

• 2+ GB RAM - I have 6GB ram - is it worth getting more?

• 3D class Video Card with 512+ MB of memory or higher. Please ensure that the video card driver supports OpenGL version 1.5 or higher and up to date - any other recommendations on this would be useful as upgrading GPUs for all our machines is a considerable cost, what works and what doesnt?!

I bit more information from Trimble to the interested and eager SU community at large would go a long way to keep people sweet and reassure them that SU will be moving in a positive direction.

Thanks. I haven't found that documents created in other programs re-format, ive tried with several fonts including some that were made using cross font? Only seems to happen in LO. Thanks for the link tho.

Hi - have attached a video to show what happens when I try to adjust the brightness of a material with an image texture. It seems to change the colour of the entire image rather than just adjusting the brightness. Thought it would behave like HSB in photoshop but some how it seems to pick part of the colour of the image rather than the overall image? Maybe Im not seeing something but I can't get the image texture to brighten?

Really want to use shaderlight cos it is so simple to use and the results are very good for the time taken but am finding working with self illuminated textures tricky because of limited settings and no easy way to adjust brighness.

As a further note are there any plans to incorporate batch rendering from multiple scenes or the ability to output to another render slave into Shaderlight. This would mean being able to continue to work while renders are being produced!

Any help much appreciated . . .

Trying to adjust brightness of image on Mac?