Coming Soon: Reload Textures

juju

Sounds interesting...

How are some of the other scripts going? I recall there are a few others you were working on but have yet to finish / release.

RickW

We can consider this my "ToDo List":

Short term:
I need to update PathCopy to rotate objects when copying to nodes.
Reload Textures free/pro versions released.

Long term:
SceneGroups is on hold until I can find a way to group multiple scenes at once.
Merge all Scene tools into one application.
Interactive modeling application

Unknown term:
Windowizer 4

JClements

Placeholder material. Great script idea Rick!

urgen

...good idea,Rick!

plot-paris

I do that manually already. sometimes if I have to create a model in very short time, I place images as textures, even if they are not seamless. lateron, when I have more time, I clean the images up in photoshop and then reload the texture in the material window (edit-tab).

but to have a script, that does that automatically, would be quite useful

kwistenbiebel

This function should be part of SU by default.
In my opinion, The ability to update a model could be nested in the 'model info' palette, situated in the 'statistics' panel next to the purge option.
I feel an 'update model' function should incorporate both the ability RickW describes (load textures) but also loading of all present components as well as a way to save all the textures and components to a user specified folder on your disk.
This is very useful as a 'Pack And Go' function when migrating your model to a different PC.
Definitely when using render software, this kind of Pack and Go feature is useful as very often the link with materials is broken when the SU file is opened on a different PC.

Maybe that's food to think about for the so called Pro version.

RickW

So, one thing I think I'm hearing is the ability to use relative path info for external components and images - is that right? Sounds like a good idea to me.

kwistenbiebel

Yes, I think both a 'load' as a 'save' function for textures/components to/from a specified folder is useful.

Phil Rader AIA

rendering apps like hypershot and fry and artlantis export all su textures to a seperate folder when you render with those applications so it must be possible to export all material textures to a seperate folder and also update them from that folder.

RickW

Here's the situation:

When you bring an image into SketchUp for use as a texture, a Material object is created. That object stores the original path to that texture file, so a location already exists. The free version will look in that stored location for reloading materials, and will reload it if it exists.

The pro version will let the user specify a folder to search for matching file names. I had not thought about this too much before, but I suppose each texture could be given a specific replacement. That would not be as fast for the user if they chose to do that, but it would be more flexible. The fastest/easiest way for the user would be to specify a folder for replacements.

Any need for exporting the images in a model to a folder? I know something exists that does that, but it could be added in...