@xrok1 said: ...PS nice avatar Puck Yeah, he finally put it up. Cool.

I use Maxwell. The basic process is to apply the texture from your flooring material onto your floor (so if your .mxm uses a jpg image you'll use that same jpg image in your sketchup model). Get the scale correct in your sketchup model. Use the Maxwell plugin to link that flooring texture to your .mxm file. Export model and you should be good to go. If I were to guess I'd bet you're applying a color (brown) to your flooring, linking that to your mxm and then exporting. Unfortunately if your SU material doesn't have an image telling it what scale to export out as it won't export any UV information at all. -Brodie

@charly2008 said: The idea came to me when i read that Twilight could be a little similar to Kerkythea render machine. It's no secret that Twilight uses the KT SDK (based on Kerkythea 2008 Echo), so you can say that it's KT build into SU with A LOT of things that should make it really easy to use... In the tutorials you can easily learn how to use KT materials directly in Twilight Render...

I could change it so it recalculates the end_angle as well, that way I would not have to worry what SketchUp says the angle is. But I think I have bigger issues than that.

@frederik said: The difference between 2 or 4 mesh emitters, won't be significant... This is true of progressive render methods, but it matters a LOT with Easy methods 1-7. The time difference is most in methods 1,2,& 4 (the fastest settings)

find_faces was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks,

i believe it is a jpg file. i copy and paste the light fixture to a nother file and re link the material and it some times works. it might be to do with the light/alpha map being in a group.

I've managed to get molecule images into SU by using Accutrans 3D (Vivaty doesn't read VRML 1 files ) to convert VRML files into 3DS format then importing into SU. [image: OPAJ_benzene_SU.jpg] [image: y0m2_molec.jpg]

I would definately use IR map for primary lighting and then Light cache for secondary. Use reinhard for your color mapping and adjust the burn value lower if you have overexposed areas of your rendering. For image sampling, I would start with adaptive QMC and if that is not getting you the amount of detail you desire, then switch to the"fixed" type and see how that works (this will probably increase rendering times a bit though). For your IR map, I would use a min of -3 and max rate of 0 with subdivides at 50 and samples 20. Those are for final quality settings and can be adjusted for tests. I just gave you those numbers to avoid having to explain the whole min and max concept, because it is kind of abstract and is better explained in the manual. Light cache settings are pretty much just controlled by the subdivs. Start with a value around 500 for tests and then got 1000-3500 for final and increas more if you still have a lot of noise. Make sure you have enough lights in the scene as well, so put lights inside of windows in addition to the sunlight. Hope this helps. Best of luck

btw, I starting reading Google SketchUp for Site Design: A Guide to Modeling Site Plans, Terrain and Architecture (the name alone takes up the first 12 pages of the book! ) yesterday and it talks a lot about importing CAD drawings and gives some really helpful advice on a couple different methods to through the cleanup process, as well as some various ruby scripts which speed things up. He also has some interesting ways of using a few tools that help with site modeling as well. I've only skimmed it so far but if you work a lot with terrain you might check it out. There don't seem to be many SU books out there yet so getting detailed info can be tricky, at least that's my experience. arklandesign started a thread on the book here... http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=21371 -Brodie

Yea - DPI has no meaning without being accompanied by a width and height. (I I'm still amazed by advertising companies that makes the ads for out projects - asking me to send an image in 300dpi - without ever telling me the actual dimensions.)

Contact ASGVis support.

hello brodiee.. If u check out the environemt rollout.. u will find an option that controls the camera parameters such as exposure and all.. try fiddling with it.. the default values are always dull for me.. try messing with those... edit : i find these sites/blogs to be very helpful in learning mental ray : http://3dsmaxrendering.blogspot.com/ http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/ a great material sharing site : http://www.mrmaterials.com/

very generous of you! obviously this took you a while to put together even though it is probably second nature to you by now. Thanks for saving us a lot of future pain in guessing and checking!

Thanks honoluludesktop. I'll try this and see I can get the result I'm looking for.