Quickest Way to create Face and Edge objects in Sketchup

Question

I have to render a mesh of a few thousand polygons in Google Sketchup. I find that add_face tends to get slower as the number of faces in the model increases. I believe this to be due to some edge detection algorithm that Sketchup is running behind the scenes. Hopefully, there should be some way to suppress this edge detection or other processing that Sketchup is doing till all faces have been added to the model.

I found add_faces_from_mesh and fill_from_mesh to be much faster but I end up with a mesh consisting of Surface instances instead of the Face and Edge objects I am looking for.

So, what is the fastest way to generate a model consisting of Face and Edge objects in Sketchup? Is there a way to generate Edge and Face objects from a Surface object?

Update: I just read here that using Model::start_transaction and Model::commit_transaction can be used to speed things up but I found that the improvements are not very significant. Anything else I can do?

Answer 1

I found add_faces_from_mesh and fill_from_mesh to be much faster but I end up with a mesh consisting of Surface instances instead of the Face and Edge objects I am looking for.

Calling add_faces_from_mesh or fill_from_mesh with the smooth_flags parameter explicitly set to zero correctly constructs Face and Edge objects. Sketchup Documentation claims that smooth_flags defaults to zero... my trials show otherwise.

Answer 2

Just to clarify - add_faces_from_mesh and fill_from_mesh do add Edges and Faces - however, the default behaviour is to create a mesh with soft and smooth edges. When you have a set of Faces connected by Soft edges they will be treated as a surface by SketchUp and Entity Info window will say "Surface" when you select them. However - internally it's still just a set of edges and faces - SketchUp has no Surface entity.

As for Model::start_transaction - you must specify true for the second disable_ui argument in order to see any speed gains. But as you have noticed, SU is very slow to add entities - the more there is in the entities collection you add to the slower it gets. The absolute fastest way to add entities is fill_from_mesh.