"low of memory" error (meta quest 2 + sketchup app)

#1

Hello,
I would like to ask if anyone has experience with the VR sketch application crashing on Meta Quest 2 glasses with the error message “low on memory”. I have been using the application for a long time and usually I have not had a problem, but now this error has started to repeat itself quite often. It does not matter if I load the model from the Vrsketch cloud or send it directly from the Sketchup application - this problem occurs in both cases. The 3D model in Sketchup is approx. 200MB in size. It is an interior model, so it is of course a more complex scene.

Is there any way to monitor RAM usage? Or clean it up? When I look at the models in the cloud after opening them, they are “cached”. Can this have an effect? ​​

I tried searching on the Internet, but no one has solved a similar problem, or at least it is not solved anywhere on the forum where the discussion would be searchable.

Do you have any recommendations on what to look out for when creating models in Sketchup, which I then want to present via VR sketch? What fundamentally affects the complexity of the model and increases the RAM requirements? I know that the file size is greatly affected by the number of polygons in the overall model and the amount of “hi-res” textures, which significantly increase the size of the sketchup file.

Thank you for any advice or ideas on how to proceed.

#2

Hello,

The problem means that the model is really too large for the standalone Quest. Before it crashed, was it displaying the model smoothly? From experience (at least with the Quest 3), some intermediate-sized models can load but are still a bit too large for a reasonable display speed; this can make the VR experience nauseating.

But if the model doesn’t load at all and you get the “out of memory” error, the causes can be:

  • too many faces in total: see https://vrsketch.eu/docs-getting-started-quest.html#large-models.

  • or, too many textures. Each texture occupies a maximum of 4MB, but that still means that if you have more than a few hundred high-resolution textures, this can overwhelm the available (CPU or GPU) memory, which is a few GBs in total.

Cloud models are “cached” after you load them—that just means they are saved locally on the disk, not in memory, so it shouldn’t have an effect.

A common cause for complex models is overly-detailed components that you imported from third-party sources. You can inspect the number of faces in a specific component in the Components panel of Sketchup: click on a component and then switch to the “Statistics” tab there. In our experience we have seen models that have dozens of instances of a component with a large number of faces—just for a small detail in the model. For example, a laptop model may be very high-poly—and include 100 subgroups for the 100 individual keys, each one correctly rounded.

The goal here is to identify and remove such components, or maybe temporarily hide it. Note that hidden component instances don’t occupy any memory when using the “Send to VR on Quest/Pico” menu, but if you use the cloud storage approach, then they are sent to the cloud server and downloaded by the Quest, because you can make them temporarily visible. That means they will have a memory impact (but on cloud models only).

At some point in the future, we might consider making a tool in Sketchup to help you identify the overly-detailed groups and components. We’re working right now on this very issue, but in a different direction: the overly-detailed groups and components could be automatically identified and drawn in a better, more efficient way when they are hidden behind walls. The goal is to speed up the drawing with PC VR techniques, not on the Quest—and anyway it wouldn’t help much on the Quest because, as in your use case, the problem there can be memory instead of performance. But for the Quest, we could use a similar technique and then completely skip sending the components to the Quest (or show them as simple boxes or something), for example.