@fletch said: I would like to create a nice endless knot lamp to print on a 3D printer. That would look neat I bet!

shame it doe snot support Max 2012.

I didn't find anything in SketchUp's EULA or License regarding weapons / nuclear weapons. What evil things SketchUp makes possible!

Don't forget the free plugin... Gk Postscript Plot which Dave R talks about on his blog...http://www.finewoodworking.com/item/47135/printing-patterns-for-templates

Hi , first , thanx to have taken the time to answer I appreciate, really. Next , I found the solution. I had a doubt seeing all the processes on my computer. And knowing my scene, that was not a poly number problem. I remembered a thread were it was talking about the maximum size of the texture. And that was the problem. I used 12000²px texture sized. Sketchup itself could'nt have threat such an info. I resized the texture , and it worked. So that was a texture size error. Working normally on big softawre like 3DS MAX , etc , I use to make big sized textures. So that was my fault. Thanx a lot anyway for the anwser. And really good job for your software. Some lights artefacts problems persist, but globally it's a good job

@notareal said: Have you read trough http://www.kerkythea.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=10866 Also you will need to have X-11 installed. Thanks mate. Did the manual extraction and works fine. Seems it's the installer, not the app itself that's the problem.

Thea Render is one of the few commercial renderers that can offer both biased and unbiased render engines. Biased/unbiased is a question about accuracy of render algorithm, biased rendering do make some shortcuts for faster results that are needed for animations and so. With it user has a control on every aspect and parameter of render engines. Unbiased rendering is progressive by it's nature, it does offer a easy, parameter free and highly accurate, but slower rendering. You can use the same scene no matter witch engine you choose to use. Thea and SU both do use OpenGL for displaying the workspace, so one can say that even reasonable "light" GPU can handle the burden (even integrated display adapter might be enough). Later Thea will have GPU accelerated rendering, but at the moment just your system should work just fine with Thea. With i7 and 16 GB RAM it's hard to choke Thea as it does benefit from 64-bit OS - you can render more complex scenes and use more freely some features like relight (as available RAM is the main limiter). You can freely test Thea, with resolution limited and watermarked version. If you want to compare render time for 720p or higher, it will raise linearly related resolution change. So even with a smaller test render you can estimate how long it would take to render some higher resolution image... Please, be free to join to Thea Render forums for further questions. ps here is some interesting music & relight experiments by Wax http://www.youtube.com/user/wax78/videos?query=relight

@adamb said: LightUp (http://light-up.co.uk) will render TGA sequences from your SketchUp Scene animations. Thanks! I'll check into it...

What are your global Displacement settings? Have you tried playing with edge length - setting it to 1 or 0.5? (warning! very detailed and slow setting!)

Maxwell Render is at 50% off again thanks to Spain's goals against Italy -- sale discount is valid until July 8th. Best, Jason.

Hi rogueparker, Thanks for the tip. I'm going to try it. Charly

Another question, I want to position an object by aligning one of its edges to the edge of another object. Infact, I have an imported Revit file, and multiple objects appear to be linked to a helper object - if I move the helper they all move, if I move the objects they move individually. For some reason the Group function is disabled for these objects. I'm trying to align two imported models - so I want to accurately align one set of objects against the other set.

If you set the empty SKP's Model Info > Units to meters, with say 3dp and no units displayed you can input all of you dimensions as if they are centimeters [or even millimeters provided you are consistent] - thus you'll avoid the issues around the inability to make tiny facets on some meshing operations. Once you are done... IF you must make it back into the 'real' size then draw a temporary line 1 'unit' long [actually it's 1m long, but from your viewpoint it's 1cm !]; now reset your Model Info > Units as desired; now in the Model run the Tapemeasure tool and click on the two ends of the temporary line and immediately type in 1cm, when prompted say 'Yes' to scale the entire model... everything in the SKP is now the right sizes in cm - and the now very tiny facets can exist, although their creation was not possible without the 'units/scaling' trick earlier... PS: You can use the Scale tool as Gaieus suggests BUT then any groups or components will be scaled BUT their original size is unchanged [unless you do further work] - unlike with the Tapemeasure re-scale trick...

Really coming along well, Aaron; it's incredible what you guys are doing!!!!!

@unknownuser said: What is the results with the other progs ? I thought you were going to show us. I think that you should, hairy one. @unknownuser said: Is the extractor not doing the job correctly, possibly? I think you are correct. Try a different one, and/or reboot and try again.

Importing the scene to Maxwell Studio does give better results with the built in semi ortho cameras.

Just about anything is possible through Python Scripting in Maxwell -- pyMaxwell is probably one of my favorite new Maxwell features in quite some time (now if I was only better at scripting ) Best, Jason.

Outstanding article Francois! I thought you presented a really compelling argument for the value of using both SketchUp and Maxwell (as well as the combination of the two). I also want to say that the images you used as examples are excellent and highly artistic (as always). Thank-you for sharing Best, Jason.

Also, you may find this thread interesting: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=45091 Best, Jason.