@unknownuser said:

Then you can create layers to toggle the visibility of certain elements on/off (say you have 20 buildings in a lunar city - you want them to be seen "from outside" all the time but you can hide/show the interior with the massive geometry by controling layers). This can be done with a lot of stuff.

I can see that the cut and paste method that I tried it with was the culprit in the crash. Going with the component method fixed it. This evening I discovered 'explode' which has been helpful. Last weekend I got through the 'important' parts of Sketchup through "Sketchup for Dummies." It didn't get much into layers except to say that they're wicked for gumming up the works.

Again, thanks for the advice... if you know of any free tutorials (the other books I found were $80/piece) please let me know.

@unknownuser said:

Anyway, I doubt that your model would be so complex that you shouldn't be handle it with your rig. But building a whole city like that sounds a bit insane IMO. Most of the buildings would only show from outside (whatever you are doing) and you should really model from inside whatever you really want to show.

I'm not going for a game. Actually, I became interested in the project when I started trying to imagine a setting to a piece I'm trying to write. I wanted to start with a lunar city, surrounding solar arrays, including relatively massive underground areas, including gardens, farms, etc. So, it's not a game, but I really wanted to build the city first.

I'll try your suggestion about making components. I had initially just did the old ctrl-copy/paste maneuver just to see how it would look (although it's not exactly the way I'd intended. I'll give that a try right now. Thanks for the reply.

I have a fairly 'potent' computer (Q6600 on 4GB RAM, 8800 320 MB nVidia). It won't break any records, but I'm surprised at its poor performance, as it seems that Sketchup isn't going so well. I started learning Sketchup because I wanted to build detailed cities. Well, I finished one floor, sans furniture, but with all the walls set up for my sky scraper. Then I copied and started pasting them on top of each other to create what I had hoped would be a 100 meter, 25 floor building. By the time I was at the eighth floor, Sketchup was crawling. When I tried going for the 16th floor, it crashed. I seemed to have plenty of RAM available. Only one of the cores was at around 80% with the others down around 20%.

I had the brilliant idea of looking at other people's cities only to find that their cities are just made up of hollow buildings. Am I expecting too much out of Sketchup? Is it really only good for extremely basic configurations? I find it hard to believe. Certainly games have more extensive layouts than what I had going. There weren't any spherical patterns or anything of that nature.

I'd appreciate any comments.