There are several menus and windows in SketchUp that are easily overlooked, even by experienced users. The Model Info (menu: Window / Model Info) window is one of these. All of the pages of the Model
Info window are useful. But the three pages I’ll discuss here, which are relevant to model performance, are: This poor page is almost universally ignored. But it’s key when working with a large, detailed model. You can see exactly how big your model is – not physics size, but how many faces and edges it contains. If SketchUp is performing slowly, your poly count (number
of objects) is probably the culprit. SketchUp can handle very large models, especially if you have a good GPU (graphics card) and CPU. (Look soon for my post on computer hardware.) But most computers will experience performance issues at around 300,000 faces. And even with a great system, you’ll still get slow-down at around 1 million faces. To check your model face count,
make sure that Show nested components is checked. Next, look at the number of faces. Here’s an important but little-known feature: At
the bottom of this page is the Purge Unused button. If you have unused components, materials, styles, or layers, this option will clean them out all at once. (If your model has zillions of faces that can’t be purged, you can improve performance by using layers – turning off the display of objects you don’t need displayed all the time. As an example, a complex urban center model will run
faster if you turn off all trees.) This handy Model Info page controls the visibility of objects in your model while making edits to a component or group. If you’re editing one of a hundred tree components, you can hide or fade the entire rest of the model, or hide / fade the other identical trees, during the editing.Statistics
Components
If you don’t want these other objects displayed at all, you can hide them.
This gets the irrelevant things out of the way, making it much easier and faster to make your edits. (These hiding options are also available in the View / Component Edit menu.)
Units
You’ve probably used these settings on this page to to establish or change your model units. So why is it mentioned here? Because you need to be very aware of units when importing files into SketchUp. Whether importing in 2D or 3D, the units in the imported file and SketchUp must always match. This ensures that all geometry will be correctly scaled. So after importing, check the Units page.
The rest of the Model Info pages are also worth exploring. You can find a complete break down of the Model Info window here.
Importing and Exporting STL Files for 3D Printing
In SketchUp, you can import and export STL files, which are used in 3D printing. As explained in 3D Printing a Model, for a SketchUp model to become a successful 3D printout, the model needs to meet certain criteria, such as having a base and a volume and being a solid.
Improving Performance
Like all SketchUp users, you want SketchUp to be fast. Whatever your experience level or modeling style, the way you model impacts SketchUp’s performance, and this article explains how to create 3D models in ways that optimize performance. Behind the scenes, you can check how your computer stacks up against SketchUp’s requirements. And tucked into SketchUp’s preferences, you find a few settings that might also boost performance.
Setting Up Templates
Your model's template determines your model's default settings. SketchUp includes several templates for common applications, like architecture, construction, urban planning, landscape architecture, woodworking, interior and production design, and 3D printing.
Customizing SketchUp
You can customize SketchUp so that it fits you like perfectly worn-in blue jeans — the pair you wear so often you worry how you’ll ever leave the house after the inevitable hole appears in the seat, because how you could ever leave the house without those jeans? Or maybe you’re more the button-down-shirt-and-trousers type? The point is that you can fashion SketchUp to reflect your specific situation:
Classifying Objects
Some philosophers say that naming something is the first step toward figuring out what makes that thing different from all the other things in the world. In a SketchUp 3D model, this idea isn't some wishy-washy concept. When you use the Classifier to embed data into groups or or components, those groups or components become objects. When objects have names, descriptions, and so on, you can manage the details about all the classified objects.
Adding Text, Labels, and Dimensions to a Model
Can you imagine Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press, learning how to create 3D models in SketchUp? Hopefully, he’d like the way SketchUp advances his groundbreaking invention — especially the text that moves and (in some cases) updates as you work on your model. In SketchUp, you can add four types of text, each depicted in the following figure: