hi, other good option could be maxwell render standalone plugin for sketchup, there's a free version with certain limitations and for US $95.00 you can get the licensed version of the plugin... it renders within skethup so no geometry importing-exporting needed and it's so simple and easy to use best V

Check LightUp, real time render engine.

Hi Shawn - I am not familiar with the KKWS tools. Do you have a link?

I think it is a great idea also! / Niclas

Fair enough, I dropped Photoshop and After Effects after CS2 (and switched to alternative software)... so it was just an semi-educated guess. Best, Jason.

Yeah, his previous book was excellent. I've been excited to see this one as well. Should be great! Chris

yes

Did you check to make sure your faces are front facing? It could also be a bug with emissive materials. I am not sure because I have never run into this problem because I say clear of emissive materials for the most part.

This is how it's done. click on dmg and when you see it mount click on the word Kerkythea, to see Kerkythea .pkg right click show package contents, click om contents. find Archive.pax.gz and unpack it to either apps folder or new folder in my docs and call it KT or something, there you will see folders for material, globales,and more. To start KT you will need to click on Unix icon Kerkythea (not Kerkythea.ini) this will open program.BUT to open a SU file in KT you will need SU2KT 3.17 0n this page http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42&func=select&id=7 and install it like any other plugin.When you export your first SU model it will ask you where is unix Kerkythea, navigate to folder where all the folders and unix icon Kerkythea are if you followed this procedure it will work for any ver. OSX if you have ? or problems report back here. Believe me when I say I lke KT it's powerful it's FREE but you got a lot of learning and reading to do to get good at it You might want to try Twilight render written by the same folks as KT and big brother Thea render. There's lots of people here that use it and KT has a decent forum but not as it was back in 2007 and 2008 Walt

"Whoa, I only speak two languages, English and bad English"...Bruce Willis Beside the fact I cannot speak russian, metric is not terribly useful in this country either...in less your a chemist. I would pay real money for a piping program that works. Amazes me nothing has been developed for this. Sketchup has some great features, but it really sucks for anything mechanical. They should develop this if the want to keep beating down autocad.

Indeed!

Thanks tomasz, sorry if I shouted, it wasn't my intention... I'm beginner in forums use, so I'm still learning... it will no happen again About the exportation problem. I tried to save in a location I have full access to, and I tried to save it without specifying the extension. Still nothing. By the way, I'm working in Mac, I don't know if it makes any difference. I posted this question a month ago in Kerkythea forum, but I didn't get response, that's why I'm trying now here. Anyway I'll try it again. Any idea? Thanks again.

As a side note, I would suggest getting Onyx Tree for making trees. Especially if you want a hi-poly version for MXS and then export a very low poly version for SKP or even better, it will export shaded TGA which you can turn into a PNG file to save even more memory in SU. Using the new MXS reference feature it kicks serious butt. The Onyx program, although it looks dated is very powerful, will let you create tons of custom trees and shrubs and they export in 3DS, OBJ, FBX and other formats. Well worth the money. I think it was like $150 for the Broadleaf program and I feel like I have already created well over $150 in tree models. Highly recommended for sure for all SketchUpers.

One thing that is important to keep in mind when using MXM files within SketchUp is the type of tiling that the creator of the MXM file specified. There are 2 types of tiling possible: Relative and Meters. The basic idea is that Meters (which used to be known as "RealScale" in older versions of Maxwell) allows the creator to set up the MXM texture(s) to tile at a specific real-world size... this requires the UVs for that object to be 1 meter X 1 meter. The way this is accomplished inside SketchUp is via the Maxwell>UV Coordinates context menu -- here you choose your UV projection type (Cubic/Planar/Spherical/Camera) and set the projection size to 1 meter. [image: ksQe_maxwellUV.jpg] However if the MXM is set up to tile using Relative (typically with a value of 1 and 1) it will automatically tile at the scale and aspect ratio of the UVs created inside SketchUp. The easiest way to control this is to choose one of the texture images used in the MXM and create a new SketchUp material (setting the scale in the SketchUp material to whatever you want as your final). Unfortunately, often without MXED you will not know if the MXM is set to Meters or Relative tiling, and as you can see you would take very different actions in SketchUp to get proper results. Best, Jason.

thank you very much for these background informations jason! people can always count on your maxwell knowledge here...much appreciated!

Do bear in mind you have created a scene where there are many more bounces to resolve than normal (by virtue of having mirrors reflecting into each other -- AGS is just a metal mirror with reduced opacity) -- this will take time to resolve and as I said SL 18 would be the minimum I would personally accept as "final". Best, Jason.

Most likely this is an emitter/instancing issue -- disable "use instances" to check. Also, you should probably update to the newest version of Maxwell and see if that clears the issue up. Best, Jason.

hi, you can also grab mxm files from here: http://resources.maxwellrender.com/news_scripts.php?t=1 p.s. avoid using materials with displacement within Maxwell for Sketchup

Try the latest version of Thomthom's "Simple Plugins Installer", and after you've installed that and restarted Sketchup, you can try to reinstall the RBZ archive using it, rather than the native-installer [which I assume you have used initially]... It should spot some permission/VirtualStore issues that the native-installer might miss... It might still be an 'security/permissions' issue... Have you checked this, as I suggested previously ? The Plugins folder's security/permissions needs to be FULL for you [and All] and its contents/subfolders...

This is a good place to ask, but more appropriate would be Developers section.