@chedda said:

I usually stick with 3ds for exporting. However i have has some success collaborating with clients using 3dsmax. If they have a subscription ? or a legal copy they can access the sketch up plugin. I was amazed at the simplicity boom it opens no conversion or waiting even the billboards are behaving correctly.

Ah, so there is a Sketchup plugin. Been looking for one, but I was searching for one for Maya since I use it more than 3DSMax. I'll be on the lookout for that.

@unknownuser said:

Super,
1st, try purging the Sketchup file you have been dealt.

Window.....Model Info.....Statistics.....Purge Unused.

At minimum, this should improve you SU model experience.........please try this and report back.

Best,
Charlie

I found out about purging before I came here when I was researching ways to get around this and I found out purging doesn't work at all. If I try to purge the model, absolutely nothing will happen. The number of faces, forms, etc. Will stay the exact same. I was hoping that of the thousands of forms in the model, some of them would be purged. No such luck I'm afraid...

Recently, a client sent my place of work a complex model of a building they'd like us to work with... In Google Sketchup. I've been tasked with dealing with this and texturing it. As I'm sure we all know, Sketchup isn't exactly a very capable program and most computers I've attempted to open it on can barely run it or slow down because of it, including my own (and my computer is no slouch). I was hoping to export it to .obj, .fbx, or SOMETHING I could use with better 3D programs such as Maya or 3DSMax but I've been running into a multitude of problems.

1. Sketchup refuses to export to anything else most of the time (it crashes a lot). The only time it exported was when I deleted all the extra stuff within the building and only exported the walls. I was able to get it to export to obj. It worked, but I'm trying to get the inner parts of the building to render as well and every time I try, it renders for a long time only to completely crash.

2. I was able to get it to render the entire model and the inner part of the building through Sketchup thanks to a friend's really high end computer (Although the rendering took forever and it would always crash when exporting to .fbx). However, whenever I try to open those models on any other computer, everything freezes indefinitely or crashes. I exported the files in .obj, .3ds, and .fbx (The FBX exports always crashed at 99%, but left over what was rendered afterwards). All of them have the same problem. The closest I was able to get was with 3DSMax, which started importing it but later refused, saying that it didn't have the memory to import so many faces (I even tried manually telling it NOT to import the meshes with a whole bunch of faces, still the same problem since there were so many other meshes)

This has been haunting me for the past little while. I don't even know how they managed to create such a huge model in sketchup. The sketchup model is 39MB and the exports I've managed end up being anywhere from 100-400MB (and over 1GB for the FBX). I REALLY need advice on how to proceed with doing this as I am currently baffled as to what to do. I've tried everything I can think of...

Does anyone have any idea what I can do from here?