Whoah, I had no idea. It is indeed the letter Ø causing the problem. Thank you very much.

I'm tempted, but I'm not quite sure whether I should get a new license. After all, how many apps does one hobbyist need? Edit: Watched the tutorial in its entirety. It indeed is good. If you want to know about rendering in Modo, these vids are just what you need.

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=17899 Bep

Mystery solved thanks to massimo! I had to switch to rgb mode in Photoshop before saving as PNG. All is well now. Now to continue growing trees.

Hey Jason, Thanks for the reply! I will try this. Best, Pieter

An official material tutorial would be welcome! Thea is great and every time I read through a tutorial I learn something new and useful.

Some issues with service provider... we seen these happen time to time.

@solo said: Once you register Thea after purchase you can download some Xfrog trees in the licensed user section, there will be more added as they are optimised for Thea. The next version of Thea is 1,2 probably coming out next month, free upgrade to all registered users so buying now will make sense. How do you plan to use Terragen2? with Vue? Thanks for the info on Thea. I was just holding out in case they had an upcoming sale. Was wondering if historically the cg community had these conditions every year. I actually did some research and chose Terragen over Vue after reading some comparison reviews. Traditionally I been painting landscapes for many years so having a 3D landscape generator makes sense for me to have. I would like to use Terragen to make back drops, and even use generated terrain meshes to import into blender or even Sketchup. I downloaded the demo already and the only issue I'm having so far is the lack of good tutorials and info to learn the thing quickly. I would like the license version to use professionally and break out of the 800x600 maximum res. As far as xfrog goes, aside from the libraries I can get to use in Thea, I would like to have the tree generator itself so I can make my own trees. So far I been using the free Tree[d] program but xfrog look so much better. Im still feeling my way around the cg community and getting an idea of what tools will be great for me to have in my workflow. So far I got plenty of modeling tools, now I am focusing on Thea and anything that enhances the environments for my projects.

Use Maxwell Z-Clipping instead of SketchUp section planes for the type of scene you have shown -- this works, always has. Best, Jason.

So excited about this!

@archigrafix said: Yes very interesting option...hope other softwares will soon get this. Anyway I find indigo is still a little expensive IMO The RT version costs less than 100 Euros (until 23.11.), I think it is not very expensive compared to others?!

cool! these trees look good... thanks for the link! best V

@adamb said: Thanks for the heads up! I've added an annotation on the video noting the different key for Windows. Adam Cheers Adam, really enjoying this lightup, going to be playing with it all day to learn the ins and outs,

@iichiversii said: Ok that worked Rich, so what was wrong with my PNG ? and what should i have done to make it work? Perhaps what you've done is export the texture and done "save as" a PNG. Which converts it to a PNG file. But the embedded Material texture you had before that went red (named "TREE(1).PNG") was actually a jpeg with a misleading extension. but glad you've resolve it! Adam

Darn, the good ones are always taken!! lol Thanks again for your help Jason. Anita

I'm sorry to say that I just don't think the “Draft” engine is up to the task of a scene like this – I tried a bunch of things, and there were some issues, but fixing them had little impact of the draft engines output... at the end of the day the draft engine still can't clear the noise within a reasonable time/SL. [image: HYEZ_ChandellierWithNoGlass_draftSL18.jpg] If this is the type of scene you need to render often I think it really is going to be needful to use the production engine – which can do it no problem (see attached example). [image: DeG5_ChandellierWithNoGlass_prodSL14.jpg] On the off chance you want to know what I tried here is a description of what I changed (and the updated file): ChandellierWithNoGlass_jmods.zip After taking a look at the file I started to make some edits – the first thing I did was remove any geometry that wasn't needed for the render. Partially because this helps me get my bearings and find flaws but also because this makes the SketchUp file more compact. I made quite a few geometry changes and you can look at those and decide for yourself... most notably the chandelier and the rug. Then I started looking at the Maxwell settings – in particular the camera settings were very unrealistic. You had it set for an EV of 1 – for interiors a EV of 5-7 is more normal. Once I set the EV to 5 to get the camera exposure more natural I adjusted the materials – I added 2 materials: “jason emitter” and “jason emitter plane”. I used the first for the “bulbs” of the chandelier and the the second was used on a plane I set behind the camera to be used as a “fill light”. Other than that I made some tweaks to the various materials looking for too bright colors or materials using textures which were too bright. I was careful to use the entity info palette and remove any conflicting materials – meaning if the group level had one material assigned but the subgroup level had another (the table set was an example of this). I changed the wall and ceiling into my “painted wall” material, which you can download here: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=349725#p349725 Sorry I can't give you better news. Best, Jason.

Just released FluidRay RT v.0.7.6 Beta featuring: -Output to HDR & EXR formats -Dispersive index of refraction -New gem materials You can get it from the download page: http://www.fluidray.com/downloads Nicola

@cotty said: Ah, the tank Doing lawnmower duties

Yep, both of those used displacement -- which is a shame because they really didn't need it, so I made edited versions for you without displacement: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/41250852/j_edited_concretes.zip For that matter I have already made hundreds of free SketchUp materials with linked MXM's for all of the Arroway textures (including the Concrete set), which you can get here: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=107&t=38528 While it's true the Arroway textures (http://www.arroway-textures.com/) can be slightly expensive, you will find they are the best in the business... and by using my sets you will have whatever you want already ready to use just like any normal Sketchup material. Best, Jason.

Hi Jason. Thank you very much. I've applied clay material and got last scene rendered in an hour with SL=16 and Res:790*427! I read the discussion about AMD/Intel performance differences when it comes to R2. I guess there is no way to discover which material causes an issue(as long as i don't have a full version of maxwell) so i should just hide all the objects and them open them one by one to see what causes the increase in rendering time. Or alternatively I can just become a clay-addict) Thanks a lot for your help!