Bella Render
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It is definitely planned, when the time comes to replace this rudimentary plugin with a full-featured one (rendering inside the plugin, with interactivity, etc). Our first plugin was for Maya (naturally we support animation there), and I am now in the midst of fleshing-out our Rhino plugin -- after that, SketchUp is next on the list.
Though, we have had requests for Blender, so I may take a short detour and do something similar to this simple plugin, for Blender, beforehand. I have also had it on my list to do a simple one for Moi3D for awhile, based on OBJ export, and the GUI's import capability.
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OK - I hope you see some improvements in this version:
Still a bunch of stuff to learn:
- Would like to have some tutorials about how all of the features work. I looked at the documentation and watched the "intro" tutorial but still have many question.
- Is there a way to view the "ball" when changing the attributes of colors?
- How do I change the layout of the UI (sometimes I cannot see all of the render).
- How long should I let a render go? Are there any controls for this?
- Is there a way to specify the file type (i.e. png, svg, etc.)?
- Is there a way to open a saved .bsa file? Maybe the limitation here is because I have the trial version.
- I saw somewhere that the tool supports multiple SketchUp scenes (do not remember where). How does it do that.
- Are there any plans for ways to display the rendered scene? (i.e. a viewer or some other tool that would allow a viewer to go from one scene to another)
I realize some of these issues are because I am brand new to the tool and need to do a lot more exploring but some of these items would surely assist others as well. Now I need to try some interior renders to see how that works.
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Looking good so far, I'd say.
To go item-by-item on your list:
- Definitely we need more in the way of tutorials. We are all programmers, so we have no marketing-type people to work on this, and we probably tend to focus too much on code. If you have any specific requests, please feel free to make suggestions.
- For SketchUp it is necessary to use the Bella GUI to preview materials interactively. As I mentioned in a previous post, this will change once we come to making the full SketchUp plugin.
- You can just drag panels around to stack/dock them, or close some that you don't need (you can always get them back via the File > Layout menu). You can temporarily hide all panels by clicking in the image area and hitting the D key, or you can hit F to make Bella full-screen.
- Bella will happily render forever, continually refining the image more and more, so it is up to you to decide. When licensed, you can resume after having stopped, so it is not a problem if you initially set too little time. You tell it when to stop in the Beauty Pass settings (section A in the below image).
- You tell Bella the file to save before rendering, using section B in the image below. This is because a main use case would be generating files to be sent to a farm. However, you can also save images while & after rendering, using the drop-down for the pass (section C in the below image).
- There is no limitation about opening BSA files, you can open them using File > Open in the Bella GUI. However, due to SketchUp's method of installing plugins via RBZ, I do not have opportunity to put a link to the GUI on your desktop, so I recommend starting Bella from SketchUp, then right-clicking on its icon in the Windows task bar, and choosing "pin to taskbar", so you can easily open it when you like.
- This plugin does not support multiple SketchUp Scenes, it only exports the current one. You may be thinking of a question I recently answered on this forum, about the Maxwell plugin, where someone was asking about batch-exporting multiple scenes. A similar thing could be done here, if desired. We have a command-line interface that can be used to automate rendering of multiple files.
Lastly, speaking of interiors it occurs to me to mention a limitation that can easily cause issues in SketchUp: Bella does not currently support emitter materials at the per-face level. So when making lights, you should not assign anything to faces, and instead group some faces, and apply your emitter material to the group.
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Thanks very much for your reply.
Yes, most of the documentation is very developer oriented. I have been there and fully understand. Before I retired, I worked for a software company and had to write user oriented documentation. What I learned from that was that you should take nothing for granted and you must provide very detailed instructions and in most cases the "why" factor.
I will give this some thought and will consider giving you some suggestions.
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Any feedback will be welcome. If you like, I invite you to put any questions or suggestions on the SU plugin section of our forum, just to try and keep knowledge in a common place.
I suppose it may explain a bit if I mention that though the Bella GUI has quite a bit of scene-editing functionality, the main purpose for its existence is just to allow getting the rendering process out of host applications, so you can render in the background while you keep working in the host app.
So that's why the GUI is a bit fiddly & low-level -- our focus is on providing capable plugins, not building yet another 3D editing application.
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Only CPU or not ?
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Yes, CPU-only at this point, but we are working on GPU.
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Thanks for the precision!
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@jd hill said:
Any feedback will be welcome. If you like, I invite you to put any questions or suggestions on the SU plugin section of our forum, just to try and keep knowledge in a common place.
Dumb question: Where do I go to create an account? I went to the forum and clicked on the link to Log In but could not find a link to create an account so I can participate. I do have some ideas for the documentation we discussed above.
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You should be able to do it here. Just to say, I have to step out of the office for a couple of hours. Also I am polishing a couple of scenes to put on our sample scenes page, should be ready later tonight.
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As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I would like to see some documentation or tutorials about how to use Bella Render a little better with SketchUp. I decided to try to develop something and have a long way to go. I was going to post in on the Bella SketchUp Plugin forum but did not see a way to add an attachment to a post. So I am attaching it here to see if I can get some feedback from others as to whether this has any value. Would appreciate feedback but as I said, it is only a starting point.
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Looking good so far! I see you already discovered that the plugin is listening for material selection by eye-dropper (and vice-versa -- it will also select a material in sketchup, when you click on it in the bella settings window).
Apologies that we do not support hosting user content directly on our site, but the various developing laws pertaining to this have caused us to choose, at least for the time being, to simply not do so. So to post things there, you must host the content somewhere else (I use imgur for images) and link to it.
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Thank you sir. I was trying to do an explanation of The materials I had seen somewhere on your site but the I could not find it again. Hope I can do some more tomorrow.
Any suggestions or would you guys like to take over. What the heck time is in Barcelona or are you located somewhere else? :
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I'm in the minneapolis area, and the others are (and the company is set up) in barcelona, which is 7 hours ahead of me. On the help, it is actually most interesting to me to see how you are perceiving things, and how you are presenting them.
I am right in the middle of some things now so will not likely work on docs for this plugin for a week or so, so if you wish to continue I am sure it will be useful, and I can talk to the others about working something out, license-wise, to make sure you are not just donating your valuable time.
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I have now uploaded the example scenes I mentioned earlier, here and here.
They are made available in both SKP and BSZ format, which is a bella format that embeds resources along with the BSX file that uses them (BSX is the binary bella format, as opposed to the ascii BSA format written by this pure ruby plugin).
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Hi Jeremy!
I posted in the Bella forums but cannot seem to see the post for some reason...anyways...
I downloaded the plugin and this happened :
I gotta be honest here... i did struggle a bit with navigation to get the right view and there were a few other things like saving the image (without entering the name it would overwrite the old image etc), and finding all the options in menus and submenus was kind of a pain.. i know this is not the final plugin but getting it to work for us common folk requires some extra patience!
BUT.. i love the quality of light i am getting from the render. The image resolutions does not do justice to the renders here.
i am looking forward to the updates and will definitely give this another spin in the future! -
Hey jenu nice to see you.
That is really strange about the forum -- it's not just you, I can see that your post is listed as most recent, but the post doesn't appear in the thread .. I'll have to check if I need to update or fix the forum software somehow.Nice to see some images, looks like you're getting the hang of it already.
True it may not be the easiest thing to use once you get to the GUI (though, that is a bit of a fooler, since it is hiding a full nodal model underneath, while not forcing people to deal with big node graphs), but I made no secret that this is basically an internal script I wrote early on just so the other guys could generate their own geometry during Bella's early development. So it's a bit of a geek toy for sure at this point.However, still worth noting that much of the code that's in there will remain even in the eventual full plugin, so it's good for it to see some use, so we catch any issues early, which will speed up development of the full plugin when the time comes.
And meanwhile, just keep in mind that we have here basically a blank slate for that development. I created the early SketchUp plugin forum, and then this plugin, mainly so that anyone who wishes, can get involved early, to help shape how the full plugin ends up looking.
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Hi jenujacod, take a look at the document (PDF) I posted earlier In the thread and see if it is headed in a direction that is/would be helpful to you. It still has a long way to go but it was something I had suggested to Jeremy/Bella.
BTW: Your render looks good to me. Especially given where the plugin is in its early development stage.
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A few more with some trees from the skatter plugin... i couldnt get the grass in (sketchup couldnt handle the raw geometry)
I love the quality of renders coming out of Bella and i am really excited to see where you take the plugin next! hopefully we can get an integrated plugin in the near future!
Jeremy, In the bella forum, i have posted a few points for your consideration.
@ NTXDave : Your PDf seems to be heading in the right direction. Maybe a few step by step points would be helpful for the plugin in its current state? Many folks wouldnt have the time on their hands to find out where certain things are right now in the Bella interface.
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I wonder how this does with all interior and no natural light. I admit,as mentioned above, I downloaded and got my model into Bella and didn't quite see what to do next, as I might with other plugin renderers. It's hard to find the time to experiment, or learn a new interface. Always looking for more speed relative to computing power as well as speed and smoothness of setup operations.
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