Textures, shaders, enhanced opengl

artofseeing · 20 May 2010, 08:01

hi all,
iwas wondering.
since sketcup is based on oepngl,
would it somehow be possible to enhance the texture section
by adding shader properties like bump, displacemnt, specular, diffuse etc. ?

i know from cinema 4d that there is an "enhanced opengl" capability that lets me see
that stuff inside the opengl viewport.

not all, but at least some features like bump and specular would be a great enhancement.

does anybody know of something in that direction?

thanks

thomthom · 20 May 2010, 10:35

LightUp? http://www.light-up.co.uk/

artofseeing · 21 May 2010, 08:02

well actually yes,
i already gave the last 2 version of lightup a go.
it is quite of nean especially when adding lights.
but for the export to external renderers it would also
be neat to have material shading channels of some sort to pass on.

ive been using SU for 5 years now and theres so much still
i would like to see, or know if its being worked on or if sketchup is
going to be the rest of its life the way it is now.

e.g. 64bit, multicore support.

well just asking

thomthom · 21 May 2010, 08:15

I don't think SU will be getting any advanced shaders. Doesn't sound to be within the scope of sketching.

As for 64bit, don't think it'll happen any time soon. 64bit can in fact hurt performance as the bigger 64bit types require more processing than 32bit. It's more of the benefit of being able to address more RAM where this is interesting, but for SU modelling I've not experienced the need for 64bit. But I do render with VfSU, which runs inside the sketchup.exe process, and that puts the 32bit limit on V-Ray which I do run into some times.

Multicore: this is often asked for. But multi-core support is not an easy thing to add on. Many things simply can not be split into multi-core. I read request for multi-core as "make SU faster".

Most of times the requests for 64bit and multi-core from users is that it'll instantly make everything faster, while in reality it is not that simple.

Gaieus · 21 May 2010, 09:31

Yeah, 64 bit support could be beneficial for exporting (rendering, 2D export size limit etc). ATM I also often get to the limits of RAM when rendering/exporting really large images from inside SU.