[Solved]Shadows acting funky

thomthom

Have you tried without Hardware Acceleration? In case this is a graphic card / driver issue.
What card and driver version do you have?

thomthom

Ah! I know what this is!

I actually wrote about this some time ago: http://www.thomthom.net/thoughts/2012/03/the-secrets-of-sketchups-materials/
(Scroll down to Bug with Materials and Color Alpha Channel and see example and description of bug.)

To fix all materials in your model, enter this one-liner in your Ruby Console:
Sketchup.active_model.start_operation('Fix Materials',true);Sketchup.active_model.materials.each { |m| c=m.color.to_a; c[3]=255; m.color=*c; };Sketchup.active_model.commit_operation

thomthom

Very nice model by the way!

hellnbak

You the man!!!

While I don't pretend to understand any of the reasoning behind it, it did the trick!

You are now on my Xmas card list

hellnbak

@tobobo said:

Strangely when I open the skip the shadows work fine.

Maybe I'm missing something

Maybe you had already run ThomThom's miraculous fix?

thomthom

@hellnbak said:

While I don't pretend to understand any of the reasoning behind it, it did the trick!

It's a bug in the quirky design of SketchUp materials.

A material has a Color property - and Color property contains RGBA info.
Materials normally ignore the A value of the colour and use the Alpha property of the Material itself.
However, for some reason, when the Color property has the alpha value set to 0 the object doesn't case a shadow. And sampling materials with the Sample Color from Screen tool can in some cases set the wrong A value for the Color property.
This is a bug I've reported to the SketchUp team.

hellnbak

@thomthom said:

@hellnbak said:

Well, I can live with 99% opacity

That's going to hurt performance. Transparency adds overhead to processing of the model in the viewport.

You mean that whenever I make a material transparent, even just a little transparent, it affects the processing of the model enough to hurt performance? Or did you say that just because the affected materials in this case pretty much involve the entire exterior and some of the interior of the model?

thomthom

When a material is transparent the 3D render engine (SketchUp's viewport) need to perform more calculations in order to determine the colour of each pixel. As you see in the Styles setting you can set to Faster, Medium or Nicer. The better the slower. For max performance you can disable transparency all together. (I do that some times with heavy models with lots of glass or clip maps.)

hellnbak

Well, thanks again. And thanks to everyone who offered their advice and suggestions.

Rich O Brien

You need to set a template that uses as little resources as possible. Add eye-candy for export

hellnbak

@rich o brien said:

You need to set a template that uses as little resources as possible. Add eye-candy for export

Actually the computer I built a year or so ago seems to handle everything pretty well. Once in a while when moving a model the textures blank out for a few seconds, but if I run Purge (the plugin) it takes care of that. I've always wondered why Purge does that, even when nothing is actually purged. But then I also wonder how bread becomes toast

Rich O Brien

Because it handles does not make it necessary. My modeling template/style is minus all the fluff that makes output look nice.

andybot

don't know why, but if I just change the saturation value by 1 step, and then change it back, it works fine. (for example color_A16 is H:169 - if I change it to 170 and back to 169, the shadows appear)

edit: works in any of the HSB, RGB, HLS modes with any number. didn't try the color wheel as there's no direct # control)

edit again: wow, didn't see all the info from thomthom (while I was slowly multitasking ) - pretty sweet.

Rich O Brien

http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2011/10/speed-up-sketchup-use-fast-styles.html

hellnbak

@rich o brien said:

Because it handles does not make it necessary. My modeling template/style is minus all the fluff that makes output look nice.

I'm interested, could you explain this a bit?

hellnbak

Thanks Rich, some good information there, although the only one that applies to me is transparencies and I only use them for windshields. I do use Hidden Geometry a lot but I use a hot key to toggle it on and off as needed. Also, although I rarely use Scenes, I never noticed the options in Scene Properties, that could be very useful in the future.

BTW, how the heck do I mark this thread as "SOLVED"? (didn't know I was supposed to do that until recently)