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Podium Walker FAQ

I. Crashes. There are some cases where Podium Walker is known to crash.


  • 1. Not enough system memory. The first case, is SketchUp models that are too large to be opened by Podium Walker and you are using a 32 bit operating system. If you have a 64 bit Windows or Mac system, make sure you download the 64 bit version of Podium Walker. For the Mac, from version 1.0.7, the Mac version of Podium Walker uses the universal binary so it will detect whether or not your Mac has a 32 bit or 64 bit OS. But in any case, your system memory (RAM) must be greater than 4gb for Podium Walker to take advantage of the 64 bit operating system. If you have SketchUp models with hundreds of thousands of faces and/ or hundreds of textures they may fail to render. Check your models size by opening it in SketchUp and looking at the model info.

      • Look at SketchUp's Model Info and statistics. Make sure Nested Groups is checked on. How many faces does this model have? Is it hundreds of thousands? Millions? If so, you may need to upgrade your RAM memory to greater than 4gb and upgrade to a 64 bit OS.
      Delete as much as you can. Delete as many faces and textures that are not needed from your new model. Once deleted, Purge, Save and reopen your purged model. Check Model Info and keep deleting faces and textures until the size of the model is drastically reduced. Unlike SU Podium V2, Podium Walker does not process geometry and textures that are on hidden layers so there's no need to do the Copy and Paste In Place method.

  • 2. Mac crash instantly upon opening Podium Walker. This is a rare situation but happens to a particular type of model.

    Upon invoking Podium Walker, it crashes immediately and takes down SketchUp. We think that some models have a property or an attribute that the Mac version of Podium Walker can not calculate. We are working on a solution to this. But there is a work around that works almost always.

    The work around.

      1. Open the problem model in SketchUp.
      2. Choose Select All from SketchUp's Edit menu. This will highlight the entire model.
      3. Choose Copy from SketchUp's Edit menu.
      4. Open a new SketchUp file (a new instance).
      5. Choose Paste in Place. You may need to Zoom extents and rotate to see the model correctly. None of your scenes will have been copies and any hidden layers or objects will not copy.
      6. Invoke Podium Walker

  • 3. Mac crash after opening and re-opening Podium Walker five or six times.. We have noticed that if you open a model in SketchUp and then open it in Podium Walker, close Podium Walker, close the model in SketchUp and repeat this process several times, SketchUp will eventually crash. This is because bad data is being based from SketchUp to Podium Walker. The solution to this, is to quit SketchUp completely and restart SketchUp.

II. Face-me trees, plants, people

    Face-me 2D trees, 2D plants and people, especially those from Podium Browser are very convenient especially since they are much smaller than 3D trees and plants. However, please note that every time that the face-me components rotate to face the camera, Podium Walker needs to re-import the entire SketchUp model each time the camera changes position. If you have dozens or even hundreds of face-me components in your model, this re-importing will slow your video export down dramatically. The work around is to explode the face-me components.

III. Upgrade frequently

    We are constantly upgrading Podium Walker to handle larger files so please check the Podium Walker download page to see if a new free upgrade or update is available. For example, for Mac users upgrading to version 1.0.7 will be beneficial as this version and above can handle models with a large number of textures including the textures on all the leaves of a 3D tree.