I have also heard a lot of "we went with Revit" and I do think thats appropriate if you are producing construction drawings on large scale projects. What I am primarily talking about is from a viz artist point of view. Producing high end visuals using V-Ray and Thea and soon to be sending things out to Unreal (which actually might solve this whole problem). It's the detailed furniture and decor that really make a rendering sing.

@pixero said:

Sketchup is saving all the textures inside the SU file which makes it bigger.

Agreed that most of the time it is textures that come in with the model. 36MB OBJ imported with no textures, blew up to about 60MB. So it is not as dramatic as I made it seem, but it still is an issue.

I just tried it and it does seem to do a pretty decent job at aligning the car on the mesh below. Thanks for the advice!

@box said:

Smart Drop.
https://sketchucation.com/plugin/773-smartdrop

Correct me if I am wrong, but smart drop will not consider each corner of the boundary box though.

For example, each tire would need to be intersecting with the terrain mesh below.

@shawb said:

'Align selected entities to pick points' is in 1001Bit Pro. Have not used this feature myself so maybe look for a YouTube vid?

Ah... so it is still in there, I thought it was missing! Got it!!! Thank you.

Back in the day 1001 Bit Pro used to have a tool that would let you align an object (car for example) using 4 points and align it on to a terrain. There are plenty of Drop plugins bit none that I know of that will take a bounding box of an object and align it, or is there?

@jonfar said:

For me, proxies, components and good modeling habits help a lot to work around those limitations

Agreed, but my point we shouldn't have to and it's been proven by other applications that it is possible.

Explain how importing a 35MB obj makes your SketchUp model grow by 200+MB? Where is all that bloat coming from? My question is more along of the lines of shouldn't SketchUp, based on all the technologies out there at this moment, be able to handle hi poly models? And I am not talking about it chokes after a dozen or so, one single hi poly bed or sofa kills a file.

To me, it just seems like SketchUp showing it's age. Old coding maybe?

There are many, like Sonder pushing the limits and boundaries of what SketchUp can do. Now imagine being able to bring in a 300K poly object and have it run as smooth as importing a low poly chair from Form Fonts. Why isn't this possible, if it is for so many other modeling applications? Does it require a full rewrite of code that Trimble doesn't want to invest in (aint broke - don't fix)? Is it the limitations of OpenGL? It makes me wonder if I am holding myself back by continuing with SketchUp.

It's an amazing tool that has allowed me to find a lot of work and allowed me to design and illustrate very quickly. My struggle is when I want to render an interior and need to populate the model with hi poly objects converted through the convoluted process of getting it from OBJ or MAX into SketchUp only to make my model come to a crawl. Revit, Max, Blender, Thea Studio, Lumion and all other programs I have used can take these models and work with them. SketchUp simply cannot and I think we should be asking why.

There was an earlier thread about SketchUp and hi-poly models and I am sitting here wondering why every modeling application out there handles hi-poly models just fine and SketchUp still does not, even after all these years.

It's really the one thing keeping SketchUp from really pushing the limits and playing with the big boys and really the only complaint I have about SketchUp. I have been a user since the At Last days and will probably always be a SketchUper but there are times where I feel like my models and my renderings would be much improved if I could get hi-poly models into SketchUp and work the way SketchUp does with the low poly stuff. Import one hi-poly sofa and my model is not 10X the file size and runs like I just took a time machine back to 2004 SketchUp in 32 bit.

Proxies and Skatter have really helped get around all of this, but it still leaves me scratching my head why nothing has been done about it and if anything will ever be done about it.

Do you have the latest GPU driver installed?

Is there a way to have pressure (or have a future feature) where you can have a pillow and drop it on to a sofa or bed? I have played with this in Max a little bit.

@hornoxx said:

looks really fantastic - is this fur here is a V-Ray internal feature?

Yes, what you are seeing is V-Ray Fur.

This is a fun one! Having a great time playing with it and V-Ray Fur. TAKE MY MONEY!!!

Enscape will blow your mind. Not turning back once you go VR.

@rv1974 said:

The most effective way:
Eneroth Texture Positioning-
Align texture to edge

This plugin is one of my favorites - use it about 100 times a day - get it! You can set rotate 90 to a keyboard shortcut. Useful when working on millwork.

Looking to see if anyone has an updated trick to turn a series of lines into reveals. I have tried SU4U lines to components and Dline but I cant really get those to do work properly. I would prefer to not have to do a Boolean operation. Dline was working for a bit but seems buggy and inconsistent.

Looking to see if anyone has an updated trick to turn a series of lines into reveals. I have tried SU4U lines to components and Dline but I cant really get those to do work properly. I would prefer to not have to do a Boolean operation. Dline was working but seems buggy and inconsistent.

Are you guys mostly on Mac or PC?

I did install all plugins fresh and installed on a brand new workstation so there are no registry issues. I guess it could be plugin related. I will try what TIG suggested since he is probably one of the top authorities in all things SU - Thanks all!

I've been using SketchUp for over 13 years and by far, 2018 is the most unstable version I have encountered. Crashes, bugs, slowness, so so so many issues. Anyone else feeling the pain here?