If you have multiple users on the same computer, when you open SketchUp Podium Walker will only be available for one user account.

This issue arises due to the directory Trimble has chosen as the default plugin location for SketchUp 2015 in Windows:C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\Plugins\. This is a user-specific directory on Windows.

Manually solving this problem

You can manually solve this problem by installing Podium Walker for each user OR copy the folder called Podium Walker and the ruby load file called loadPodiumWalker.rbs to each of the user folders.

So if you have three users, John, Paul, and Ringo, SU Podium would need to be installed or copied to these locations:

C:\Users\John\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\Plugins\
C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\Plugins\
C:\Users\ringo\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\Plugins\

Another Solution: Move Podium Walker to a different directory:

A different solution is to move Podium Walker to this folder:

C:\ProgramData\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\SketchUp\plugins
This location is “above” the user folder so if installed here any user of the same computer can see Podium in SketchUp.

To Change:

1. After installing the PodiumWalker.rbz file, quit SketchUp.
2. Go to this folder. C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\Plugins\
3. Copy the file loadPodiumWalker.rbs and the folder PodiumWalker.
4. Then go to C:\ProgramData\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\SketchUp\plugins\ and paste loadPodiumWalker.rbs and the folder PodiumWalker to this location.
5. Go back to C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\Plugins\ and delete the file loadPodiumWalker.rbs

There is a bug in SketchUp 2014 and 2015 . This if you have a user account name that uses multi byte characters, Podium Walker will not load and you will see error messages when you open SketchUp after installing Podium Walker. Multi byte characters are Japanese, Korean, Chinese and some other languages.

Possible Solutions:

1. New Username: Create a new user account name that is English or single byte.
2. Move Podium Walker to a different directory: A different solution is to move Podium Walker to this folder:

   C:\ProgramData\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\SketchUp\plugins
   This location is “above” the user folder so if installed here any user of the same computer can see Podium in SketchUp.

SketchUp models may occasionally be too large to be opened by Podium Walker when using a 32 bit operating system with limited system memory

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 unnecessary models and components:

Delete any 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.