I’ve just upgraded from V1 to V2, and there’s one feature that I hoped I’ll get - and I’m qiute disappointed.
Is it possible to use solid preview instead of wireframe boxes?
Main factor that impacts Sketchup performace is number of edges it has to display. If you 'll try to rotate a milion of cubes with visible egdes you will face significant loss in performance. But if you’ll hide the edges of those cubes, viewport will work just fine.
So I presume, that if Skatter would use solid boxes (or pyramids, or custom meshes loaded like LODS, or even full meshes) during generation, the performance would increase.
Image below shows few thousand cosmos models with In model setting, each preview has ~6k faces. Without edges viewport works smoothly, with them - horribly.
I did some tests with thousands of cubes with and without edges in the model, and the viewport feels faster without edges indeed. That’s an interesting thing to know.
However, Skatter’s preview does not work by injecting edges into the model to display wireframe boxes. That would be quite slow and also clutters the scene’s hierarchy.
Instead, Skatter directly renders the wireframes using a low-level drawing API provided by SketchUp for extensions, to draw custom stuff on top of everything else.
Using this drawing tool is way faster than adding objects into the model.
We can draw more than lines (faces, text, etc…) but I quickly prototyped another preview type that renders boxes with faces instead of edges and performance are way worse that only lines, so drawing more detailed assets would be even worse.
Due to the nature of Skatter, we have to favor the preview type that degrades performance less when having thousands of instances.
There’s a way to approach the kind of “preview” you want though. You could create your own proxy from a full geometry object, and then use the proxy in an In Model composition so that they appear in the scene.
You could also disable Skatter’s preview by clicking the eye icon in the Composition Editor if you don’t want the wireframe around your proxy instances.
The downside of this method is that it’s not a real preview and you would have to generate the composition to see the results in the model. We have an “automatic generation” mode planned for a future update that would make this more convenient.
Thanks!
I’ll try proposed solution - looks like exactly what i’m trying to achieve here. Not sure about “in model” and how that would affect performance of Shetchup’s Outliner, but maybe…
Will do some test and let you know how it works for me.
