This is kind of related to the thread above. So, on David the Swarfers advice, I downloaded and installed SketchUCam, since I needed it anyway. Now after a few days of running it, I have noticed a couple of bad bugs in SketchUp. 1. Sketchup regularly crashes, where it almost never did so before. Usually when I select some objects to move, I get the hourglass and the program is completely unresponsive. I can still minimize and close it using the window buttons. It will sit there for several minutes and then come up with the bug report screen and shut down. 2. Loading of larger models has become glacially slow. I start sketchup, open a file thru the file menu, and wait. Sometimes it takes 7-8 minutes for the file to load. I get a white screen with "not Responding" at the top, but it will just sit there for what seems like an eternity. I have had files take up to 15 minutes to load. These are all files that previously took only 30 seconds to come up. 3. After starting Sketchup, when I use the file/load menu item, Sketchup comes up with a box that says "Save Unnamed before proceeding?" or something to that effect. This is before I have done anything. It's like it wants to save the blank file that it starts up with. Never did this before. I am going to uninstall SketcUcam and see if that fixes it. If not, I am going to reinstall SU 2016 too see if that works. So far not to happy with SketchUCam...
Update: After uninstalling all the Phlatboyz tools, g-code plotter, and airfoil (whatever the heck that is), loading of a file is now almost instantaneous again. Remains to be seen if the crashing issue is resolved, but I suspect it might be... God I hate crappy software... Are there any other options for generating G-code from sketchup?
Hi in Sketchup, turn off the 'autosave on schedule' thing. Window|Preferences|General - uncheck 'autosave' I have Sketchup 7, 8, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and I test SketchUcam in all of them. in none of them do I have any slow loading nor crashing issues, so long as autosave is turned off. In some versions I have a lot of other plugins loaded too, and I do not have issues there either (I mention this because plugins can interact, ususally in bad ways). none of the Beta testers have reported slow loading either. However, I will unload it and see if it makes a difference in load times. on large complicated drawings Gcode generation can be slow (it might have 50000+ lines to process!), but this can be solved by selecting the part of the drawing for which you want Gcode to be generated. This allows the pre-processor to ignore all the rest of the drawing and just do the selection. The other day I watched a video of someone trying to generate Gcode from Fusion360 (basic version is free) which failed, and then from HSMworks (high dollar!) and they had to stop the process because it had already taken ~10 minutes to 'think' about making Gcode and that was indicated as about 10% of the process IIRC. By changing some parameters it got down to doing the whole process in half an hour or so. This was on a high end PC with 16GB RAM etc, generating Gcode for a thing that is less than 1/8" across. Granted, cutting titanium is a bit tricky and I would not recommend SketchUcam for that (-: PS: 'airfoil' is for loading airfoil data files so you can model accurate model airplane wings. SketchUcam has its origins in model airplanes.
Justin: I have a quad core AMD 3.4 GHz processor with 16GB of ram, Radeon HD6700 video and an SSD, so it shouldn't be slow. It's about 3-4 years old but performs flawlessly on other software. As I said, after disabling all the extensions, it is back to loading a 25MB file in a few seconds. David: I don't want to have to disable Autosave just to install extensions. It's saved my bacon quite a few times already. The only thing I notice with Autosave is the mouse cursor stops responding and goes to the hourglass cursor for a few seconds every 5 minutes or so. Seems like it performs its function quite admirably. Had virtually no crashes with Sketchup pre-extensions. When I get focused and working I frequently forget to save for quite a while, and with the crashes from SketchUCam, every 5-10 minutes, Autosave was mandatory. Can't they fix SketchUCam so it plays nice with Autosave? How would Autosave cause the program to take 15 minutes to load a 25MB file? It should not even be active until the first Autosave event is triggered. For that matter, why should an extension that I haven't even used yet cause problems with Sketchup? I've never even tried to use the g-code generator yet. I could maybe understand if I was trying to generate g-code and it crashed, but all the time? And how do you permanently delete or uninstall your extensions? At least I can't figure out how, but admittedly I'm somewhat of a SketchUp noob. If I go into Window/Preferences/extensions and uncheck the extension, as soon as I exit back to the program it re-enables itself. Disabling, shutting down, and restarting does not get rid of it either. I could not figure out how to disable it permanently. The only way I could get it to stay down was to increase the Extensions Loading Policy to "load approved extensions only". With that, I still get a nag screen whenever I start the program asking if I'm sure I don't want to load these extensions. Sorry if I seem a bit upset, but stuff like this really presses my buttons. I know it's free software, and it's bad form to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I hate having to jump though hoops and sacrifice useful functionality just to get it to work. Or to get rid of it if it doesn't. Doesn't matter how much something costs, it matters what it's worth. And I know that at least some of this is SketchUp's fault. VENT MODE OFF
David: Just to confirm, and these times are loading the same file, from a fresh load of Sketchup. This is also with just enabling phlatboyz tools, not phlatbone, G-plot, or RepairBL. Times with SketchUp already open, from clicking the load file/open button till the model appears: Re-enabled phlatboyz tools, - opening a 25MB file took > 3 minutes. Disable autosave, - file load took about 1 min Disabled phlatboys tools, - load took <3 seconds Re-enabled autosave, - load took < 3 seconds Just to see if the other extensions had any effect, autosave still enabled: Enabled Phlatbone - load time < 3sec Enabled RepairBL - load time just under 3 minutes Enabled g-code plot - load took just over 3 minutes These seem to consistently take about 3 minutes, however I have seen times much longer than this, enough to play 2 or 3 games of Freecell...
please send me your sketchup file so I can look into this in more detail (start a private conversation if you like). oh and "why don't THEY fix it" = 'they' is ME (-: and I don't fix problems I don't have or don't know about. Sketchup never has had a mechanism for removing plugins, and until one of the last revisions of v8 there was no installer either, you had to copy files to the right folder manually. So, Google for 'how to remove plugin from sketchup' and I'm sure it has been discussed to death all over the internet so I don't need to repeat it. as for disabling autosave, we mention that because it is a known causer of crashes and is therefore the first thing to turn off. you only need autosave if it is crashing (-: CTRL-S saves the file, so I just automatically press it (in all programs) if any interruption occurs, new idea, oh **** moment, almost anything can trigger a CTRL-S (-:
So how often does it save this .SKB file? And where does it put it? I would assume that this file is only created when you do a regular save, in case the save operation fails or something. In this case, it would be useless as a backup for crashes, cuz if you forget to save for half an hour, it would also not be created...
to get back to your long load times...... I see that too, almost a minute to load when Sketchucam is an active plugin. but then, that drawing does have some 240000 line segments in it, so it is hardly surprising! hav'nt had a chance to dig into the code yet...
David: Yeah, I told you I was a noob. There's probably a lot of artifacts in there buried inside the model that are not visible. I know I was having problems selecting and moving certain parts without selecting bits of other parts unintentionally. And, I used the Explode command way too much until I discovered the Edit Component command. There are also a lot of groups, which I'm told are slower to load than components. The main thing to note here is that regardless of how much junk is in the file, without SketchUCam enabled it takes less than 3 seconds to open the file... That's 60X longer with SketchUCam enabled.
