Hi Viggo, and everyone else following this thread,
First of all, thank you for the feedback. We always appreciate it and we want to hear your opinion, also when it is critical, it is really valuable for us. Thanks as well for the detailed report and the recording, it made the investigation much easier on our side.
Sorry for the long silence, this is on us (on me, actually). We were investigating this together with the developers, and at the same time preparing the upcoming SketchUp 2027 support, so things did not go as fast as we expected. My apologies.
I grouped our findings/answers below.
About Turning The Sync Off
We looked at this first, because it is the main request here. SketchUp PBR materials are the standard material type now, so there is no version of this where Enscape simply ignores them. It is not that we do not want to, it is not possible.
But we would like to understand the request better. When you ask for an option to disable it, what exactly do you have in mind? For example, that Enscape does not write anything into the SketchUp material, or that the SketchUp material editor does not affect your Enscape materials, or something else. If you can describe how it should behave in your daily work, that helps us a lot.
Performance
This is the one we take most seriously, because it hits your work every day. We can confirm the slowdown when values sync between Enscape and SketchUp, and it gets worse with large textures. Our developers are investigating it now, and this is our first priority out of everything reported here.
If any of you can share a project file where material editing is slow, it would help us a lot.
SketchUp Not Updating
You are right that it looks like SketchUp is not updated when you change something in Enscape. But this is not what happens. The values are written correctly into the SketchUp material, what you see is a SketchUp UI issue, the editor does not refresh the values it shows.
We are investigating ways to fix this. For now, if you want to see the updated values, switch between Select and Edit in the SketchUp Material Editor and they update. Saving the file and restarting also shows the correct values, but this is not really a workaround.
Why The Files Get Bigger
SketchUp converts textures to grayscale when it stores them in its PBR slots. Enscape needs the original colour data, a normal map for example becomes unusable once the three colour channels collapse into one. So when you set up a material in Enscape, we save the texture to SketchUp and we also keep a clean copy of the original inside the SketchUp material. This means the same texture can end up stored more than once in your file, and that is where the growth comes from.
We are in touch with Trimble to find a way to fix the grayscale conversion. Furthermore, we also investigate ways to reduce the file size on our side.
Normal Maps
We identified some degradation for normal maps if you add them through SketchUp, because the colour data that a normal map needs is not kept. Our developers are in touch with Trimble about this. For now, please add normal maps through the Enscape Material Editor.
The Differences Between The Two Material Editors
A few things behave differently in the two editors and we know this is confusing.
When you uncheck a map in SketchUp, it disappears from the Enscape channel, but it is not deleted. Enscape has no state for a texture that is loaded but switched off, so it simply stops showing it. Turn the checkbox back on in SketchUp and your texture is there again. Deleting a texture is a real delete on both sides.
The value ranges are different as well. SketchUp uses 0 to 5 for normal maps, Enscape uses 0 to 200% in the UI. We map between the two, and a value survives a round trip unchanged, so there is no drift and no precision loss even when the numbers look different.
We understand the request to simply match the SketchUp UI, but it is not that simple on our side. Enscape is one material system for Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, Archicad and Vectorworks, so a UI change here affects all of them. On top of that, your existing projects carry the current values, so changing the scale now would change how your old projects look. This is why we adapt to the host application in the data and keep our own editor stable.
One More Thing About Versions
With the upcoming SketchUp 2027 support, SketchUp 2024 will still work with the latest Enscape version for one more year. We will not fix new bugs for it in that period, but it keeps working, so you are not forced to move immediately.
Finally
This is where we are at the moment. If anything above does not match what you expected, please tell us. We would rather hear it directly, also when it is critical, and we will keep you updated as the investigations move.