SketchUp Model Updates & Optimization

I'm a huge fan of optimization... as a programmer and web developer, improving the performance, simplifying algorithms and reducing resource utilization in my code is something that I constantly strive to do. I'm rarely satisfied by simply writing or using code that is "dirty but gets the job done".

Yesterday I made some updates to the SketchUp models of the Commodity Exchange Tower, Royal Bank Building and Winnipeg Square. Since I didn't originally create these models, they were noticeably lacking a lot of detail. The changes that were posted yesterday mainly consist of a little bit more detail enhancement... but probably a more noteworthy change in my opinion, is that the Commodity Exchange Tower model has been "optimized".

The original model actually contained a lot of detail, with hundreds, maybe thousands, of lines and faces making up the facade & windows. I shudder to think how much time and effort it must have taken to do this... unfortunately, all the extra geometry made the model swell up to a file size of 2.26 mb, or over 800 kb for the Google Earth rendition.

The updates I made were actually more of a redo -- I completely deleted all the extra geometry and created a couple of simple replacement textures for the windows and external panels. By doing this, I was able to reduce the file size to a mere 188 kb, or an impressively tiny 42 kb for the Google Earth version; a whopping 91.8% reduction for SketchUp and about 20-fold improvement for Google Earth!