[Plugin] Bitmap To Mesh
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Just want to share my first serious experiment with this plugin here. I love working with greyscale height maps.
I'm experimenting with terrain and water. Both the terrain and the water meshes were done with this plugin. Please excuse the terrain as I didn't smooth them, but this is mainly a water test anyway.
Details of this experiment can be read in a thread I started in the newbie section
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=49668&p=447473#p447473Thanks again ThomThom!!! You rock with this great plugin.
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The water is a mesh as well? o_O wow! that must be a heavy model! :s
Why not do the water as a bump map or displacement map? (since you're rendering...) -
@thomthom said:
The water is a mesh as well? o_O wow! that must be a heavy model! :s
Why not do the water as a bump map or displacement map? (since you're rendering...)It's not as bad as it looks. I try to stay at 50-100 pixels. In the more turbulent render, I splurged and went up to 150 pixels and it only took a few more seconds to compute. It only took seconds for these meshes to compute and the model is just fine. The water mesh is actually 1 component x2 with the second mesh component flipped so the waves line up and I don't see a seam in the render. My rig is a 4 year old Q6600 running XP. There is no performance hit at all, the export to Kerky was not long especially if the mesh is made with a 50 pixel bitmap. I just make sure I put those Xfrog trees in Kerkythea and not in Sketchup.
Why not bump or displacement map? I'm a firm believer in modeling for lighting and shadow effects as much as possible before faking with bump and displacement maps for the sake of authenticity. I did try the bump map way and was not satisfied with the results in Kerky because the shore line was just flat and not showing the waviness of the water. Not saying I don't use bump maps, I love playing with them. Just thought this plugin would take it to the next level as long as my rig can handle it. At 50 pixels, I'm surprised at how much detail we can still achieve. I'm getting a real kick out of making bump maps to make geometry.
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@mistro11 said:
At 50 pixels, I'm surprised at how much detail we can still achieve. I'm getting a real kick out of making bump maps to make geometry.
I 100% agree with you.. this plug-in is really nice.. and the combination between those heavy meshes and vertex tools is amazing.. i used them combined for this quite heavy old sofa.. used heightmap for tuft and golden decorations, then tweaked and welded them using vertex tools.. pretty much faster and effective results than any bump/displacement/subdivision modeling approach i can think of..
i took some sceenshoot and i'm planning to do a tutorial in the next days about how to model this sofa using such approach..your water looks pretty heavy-poly too..
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Panixia, that couch looks awesome! I look forward to that tutorial. Really.
I just bought Vertex tools myself earlier this month. I have more practicing to do. Artisan is also a great companion to this plugin.Yeah it's pretty heavy but not so bad. I just checked the file size of the water scenes. The one that's 50 pixels is 11mb and the 150 pixels is at 19mb. I'm gonna see what I can do about reducing poly count without losing quality. I consider a model to be really heavy when Sketchup begins to lag badly. The water mesh had a slight lag when I was moving the first copy. Other than that no lag at all.
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Hi guys!
This is a awesome plugin but i don't know how to convert into a image with grayscale.
For example, this image below.
Anybody help me?
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Image editor maybe?
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If all you do is desaturating a colour image to grayscale then the plugin does this automatically while processing.
However, as I've been trying to stress before - converting an image to greyscale doesn't give you a height map. The light and dark areas doesn't properly represent high and low points of the geometry. Shadows, reflection and light direction will give incorrect result.
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André asked for a grey scale image so I gave him one. I didn't think it would be all that useful for creating the mesh since it doesn't suit the requirements of a height map.
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First, let me apologize because I have no idea where this is going. I have never posted on any forum, so it's all new to me. What I am trying to find out is how do you download the bitmap to mesh plugin and the tt_lib that goes with it? I have been clicking on links for a while, but I'm just going in circles. I hope this plugin does what shows on the video as it could solve my problem.
Thanks,
tacokid -
Look at the very first post of the thread.
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And you can use this to aid the installation process: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=42315#p375454
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You're not going to believe this, but I was having the same trouble. You would think I'm just learning to use computer too !! I did find my problem. For some reason, when I disabled my pop up blocker and re-started my browser, the pop up blocker re-enabled. So I was chasing my own tail. Did get it downloaded and will try it soon.
Thanks a lot
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thanks. very nice.
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Just one question : no working with Sketchup MacOS ?
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Works just fine on my Mac (OSX 10.8.4)
I did this a few minutes ago.
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Yea, should work on OSX. Are you getting errors?
Did you install TT_Lib2 as well? (it's a required dependency.) -
256x256 bmp taking 45 minutes to finish. Activity monitor shows Sketchup only using 5% while this is processing.
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