EDIT: A moderator can delete this post. After numerous tests and scenarios, I’m realizing that my issue is a limitation with Twinmotion itself and the way it swaps objects with other objects. Having too many being swapped at the same time is a computational limitation.
End edit.
I have a simple Sketchup 2025 file with about 6000 of the same component that represents the locations of trees across a project. The component is a simple flat rectangle, simplified for importing to Twinmotion. The sketchup file is about 2 megabytes in size.
I imported the Sketchup file and it appeared fine in Twinmotion. I can see the thousands of rectangles that represent tree locations. If I use the “replace” function in Twinmotion to swap those rectangles with Twinmotion’s lodgepole tree model, it locks up so I can only replace small batches at a time.
Edit #3: There seems to be a “sweet spot” where replacing a certain number of objects with another object will work fine, but if you go a single item more than that, it locks up permanently. For example, replacing 500 objects works fine, but replacing 501 objects locks it up solid (500 being arbitrary – Twinmotion doesn’t tell you how many objects you have selected).
I tried a file with a smaller sample of trees (around 1000) and it ended up working, but the Twinmotion file is ridiculously large now. It looks like the sketchup components are not seen as instances of eachother so it’s creating a unique instance of the tree for every single component, so I suspect this is where the problem lies. Is there a way to replace all of the objects in a scene with a single reference to a tree object rather than having each be a unique tree object?
EDIT: Scratch that. If I right-click one of the trees that Twinmotion swapped and select “Select Instances”, it selects all of the trees, so they are tree instances and not unique copies. Now I’m more confused as to what’s happening.
The trees are positioned at real-world coordinates based on a land survey so I need them to be placed exactly where they are. Using vegetation areas won’t work too well.
Twinmotion 2025.1
NVidia 3090 TI
64gb RAM
Windows 10
Edit #2: I realized that the Twinmotion file (empty) goes from 5 megabytes to 300 megabytes after importing the Sketchup tree position components. That seems odd since the components are all basic rectangles with no depth and no materials applied, and the Sketchup file is only a couple megabytes.