viewport speed, shadows and textures

[3dway]

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help out.

 

I was wondering what can be done to maximize viewport performance in sketchup. I work for an architect who likes to sit the client down in front of sketchup and make changes (minor) on the fly. The main reason for this is that clients can't seem to get past colour schemes. We'll often take a stab at a first colour scheme and if the client doesn't like the colours they suddenly don't like the design. We actually had an experience where we sat the client down in front of a sketcup model and they said they didn't like it. Within five minutes of changing colours to their suggestions, they did a 180 and suddenly loved the design. But I digress. You can see the value of viewport speed for a situation where you are working in front of the client.

 

I have a better rig at home than at the office. I run a dual core e6700 with 2Gb RAM and at new GeForxe 8800 GTS 640Mb superclocked edition. I opened some models in sketup and noticed a few things that weren't significantly better compared to my work computer. I was hoping that it would be possible to rotate the model with the textures on and if possible the shadows on. The pause and the texture pop after rotating the view is distracting.

 

I know that what we want to do is pushing towards FireGL WYSIWYG viewport rendering, but workstation cards and workstation setups are not in the budget for this firm.

 

Is anyone else working like this? and if so what have you done to maximize viewport speed?

 

If it matters my setup at work is more like:

ATI Radeon 9200 128 Mb

P4 2.66

1.5 Gb Ram

WinXP Pro

Sketchup 6 Pro

Acad 2002.

[P.R.S. Sivakumar .]

I do not think you can get any better performance without a Quadro or FireGL workstation card which has much better OpenGL performance. Even then you should go for higher end workstation cards like Quadro FX1500 or higher.

 

In fact I also do the same thing - with clients sitting in front of the computer and watch me change colours or minor design changes. I have a Pentium Core 2 Duo-1.83 GHZ, 2 GB RAM, Geforce 8800 GT, 512 MB card. Even with this setup you cannot rotate the model with shadows showing. (textures show, of course, without any difficulty). I also like to have antialiasing turned on for smooth looking lines.

 

But I wonder whether investing in a fancy workstation card for SketchUP is really worth it - just to rotate the model with shadows turned on !!

 

Otherwise Geforce seems to do the job quite well.

 

With best regards

PRSS

[ramy]

There are many things in sketch-up that can slow your computer down...even if you have a blazing machine. Here are things to help:

 

-turn shadows off...shadows really slow your scene down.

 

-when modeling always have profile edges on, but when showing your client the model turn profile edges off.

 

-use layers: turn off objects that don't need to be seen for a certain area. Ex: furniture can dramatically slow down your scene, but putting it on a layer and turning it off can increase your scene speed drastically.

 

-optimize your file: purge useless layers, components, materials. This will speed up your scene as well as reduce your file size!

 

Sketch-Up has an incredibly fast response time (faster than Max and Revit), and I have yet to hit a limitation when showing scenes to clients in real-time with these factors in mind.