It used to be in XP that you had to change the OS to give you 3GB rather than 1.8GB of 32-bit space. I presume that fix would still help with SketchUp.

The other half of my question was whether you still had to do something to enable LargeAddressAware in 32 bit Windows 7?

A;

@thomthom said:

@al hart said:

@thomthom said:

Yes - Under 64bit Windows, SU can now address up to 4GB RAM. (I have tried it with a huge render.)

Do we have to do anything to XP (e.g. the /3GB tweak) and/or 32-bit Windows 7 and/or 64 bit Windows to use LargeAddressAware?

Do we have to do anything to SketchUp?

You don't do anything, but if you have a 64bit OS, SketchUp can address more than 2GB of memory, up til 4GB. Just make sure you have a 64bit OS and at least 4GB RAM.

@thomthom said:

Yes - Under 64bit Windows, SU can now address up to 4GB RAM. (I have tried it with a huge render.)

Do we have to do anything to XP (e.g. the /3GB tweak) and/or 32-bit Windows 7 and/or 64 bit Windows to use LargeAddressAware?

Do we have to do anything to SketchUp?

Material Channels is a post-processing technique for IRender nXt which allows you to change the color, hue or intensity of materials used in the rendering quickly - without having to re-render the entire scene.

Check out the new video on YouTube

In this example, I am increasing the brightness of the CRT screen in a rendering by adjusting the luminance of the rendered material.
(The CRT screen is a single material - from an image in the SketchUp model)

@honoluludesktop said:

Al, why didn't you ask the client who sent you the log?

I almost always get more informed responses from the SketchUcation forum than my users. Also, I sometimes find that someone here knows a lot more about these things than I would have ever hoped for.

If the file exists without a bugsplat, then I can look at it before I get a bug splat, and try to find a way to write to it from ruby. If so, it might be a clever way to keep track of what is going on before an unexpected bug splat

I found a way to redirect ruby console output to a file. I was just hoping that this might turn out to be a better alternative, and to flush the output - which SketchUp does not do when it gets bug splat. But I am always looking for better ways to write some traces to something in case something goes wrong.

See: Trace Ruby Messages

(Actually these traces are only useful for other developers. Our software never has bug splats or other bugs )

A client who got a bug splat just sent me a sketchupundo.log. I had never heard of this before (I see there is one mention of it in another forum post)

• Is this lying around somewhere while SketchUp is running? Or does it only get saves when there is a crash?

• Is there a way to add information to it from ruby? (to help trace problems)

OpenGL requires a clipping plane in front of the camera, so there has to be one.

Ray Trace renderers can set the clipping plane distance to 0 - so nothing gets clipped.

We have a IRender nXt client who inadvertently placed the camera behind a wall, but close enough to the wall that SketchUp displays it properly. However, our renderer just rendered the inside face of the wall.

We could easily set our clipping plane to match the SketchUp clipping plane, but I don't see an easy way to set or read the SketchUp clipping plane location.

Does anyone know how SketchUp determines where to place the clipping plane?

Thanks for the comments and advice.

I don't think we need a poll.

I think the general consensus is:

1. It is handy to have something beside RGB to use - especially if you want to change saturation or brightness without changng the base color.

2. People sometimes need specific RGB values - like when you are trying to match a color with a known RGB value.

3. People rarely need to know specific HSL or HSV values 0 they just want to use sliders to adjust the current color.

@solo said:

HUH?

I only have Color wheel, HLS, HSB and RGB, I use either HSB or HLS and if I need to match a color correctly then RGB.

Are the HSL and HSV on Mac only?

These other formats aren't necessarily found in SketchUp.

I was trying to find out what formats people use - for instance when processing images in Photo Shop. (I don't use Photo Shop)

I didn't just want to replicate the SketchUp color picker.If there is a better color picker out there, then I would rather emulate one that people like.

SketchUp calls one of their modes HLS, but displays it in HSL order:

I am trying to write a color picker, and am trying to decide what formats to use.

SketchUp uses RGB HLS and HSB and uses ranges of 0-255 for RGB and a range of 0-100 for HLS and HSB (with 0-360 for hue)

Windows Paint uses RGB 0-255 and HSL 0-240 for HSL.

The color picker for Windows uses the same values as Windows Paint.

Snagit uses RGB abd HSL with the HSL range from 0-255.

What would people like to see when changing colors.

If you never use HLS, HSL, HSB or HSV, then it won't matter. But if you do, which do you prefer?
(Or do you just use whatever is available)

Wikipedia offers this on HSV and HSL: "Both of these representations are used widely in computer graphics, and one or the other of them is often more convenient than RGB, but both are also commonly criticized for not adequately separating color-making attributes, or for their lack of perceptual uniformity."

@jim said:

Dynamic Components have a Copies behavior that, when set to > 0 adds another Component and appends "copy ###".

Thanks for the reminder. That was it.

Needs to become:

Its too bad they didn't use something more unique than ' copy ', so it wouldn't look the same as a component with 'copy' already in the name.

We have some logic in SpaceDesign which does not treat components which differ only after a # sign in the name as unique. (This combines components which may have had "make unique" applied, but which have the same attributes except the component name.)

However, we also have logic which treats names which are the same only after the 6 characters ' copy ' in the name. Unfortunately I forgot to add a comment when I added the check for ' copy '.

Does anyone know how a component is created, (inadvertantly), with the word ' copy ' in the name? (Perhaps when you load a component from the 3D warehouse which has a sub-component in it with a name you have already used?)

@thomthom said:

@al hart said:

But this stopped working.

When?

I don't know when it stopped working - sometime after I discovered that setting the color to nil did work (several years ago), and this past month when people started reporting bugs. (So of course, I suspected SU 8. But I just tried SU 7 and it fails there as well. So who knows...)

The bug was interesting, because the color looked OK in the SketchUp model until you saved and reloaded the model. However, the material editor showed that the material color was not set. When you click reset color it sets the color properly.

Thanks,

Just the kind of advice I need. I'll go try it out.

... Seems to work great!

Sometimes we create a new material from a texture and want to set the material color to the average texture color.

We use to do this by setting the material color to nil.

new_matl.color = nil	# use average texture color

But this stopped working.

However, we found a fix where if you set to color to itself after setting it to nil, it works ok again:

new_matl.color = nil	# use average texture color
new_matl.color = new_matl.color # this causes new color to be used properly

Go figure???

I presume part of the cookie must specify the SketchUp version - so users don't try to download components they cannot load.

I will be interested if there ideas can turn into a way to select and download components. What I would like to do it have a dialog which starts at a specific collection in the 3D Warehouse - such as this one - so users can download trees:

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=dfd59a8e2e744892e05349688101e4b4

or else starts with a search, such as

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?q=IRender+nXt&styp=c

Thank you both for the feedback.

We have about 1/2 of them uploaded.

Unfortunately, we can't seem to get a script or anything from Google to make it easier to upload 3D Warehouse files. Although they promised me one just before Brad left, it has been like pulling teeth to get a copy. I suspect they keep changing the format of the 3D warehouse so fast that it is hard to provide anything to automate uploads.

Take a look at SpaceDesign from Render Plus.

It should do everything you need. If it doesn't, let us know what we need to add.

It is not free. But if you want a nice report with costs, extended costs, totals, etc. This is the tool for you.

@gaieus said:

That's [nice] UV mapping, Al. It is definitely not a nativeSketchUp, planar projection...

These solid textures - which many rendering packages can do - do not use UV mapping. Instead they define a 3D texture - defining how the wood grain appears based on location in 3D space, rather than a position on the surface - and then "cut" the wood out of the 3D texture.

I first saw it when we did our RenderMan interface to ARRIS Cad in the early 90's. But until we had a good sculpting system like SketchUp, it was hard to find good models to demonstrate the technique.

These wood carvings are a good use of solid wood materials in rendering packages.

Here I rendered the model with a solid wood texture (Which treats the model as if it were carved from the wood - sculpting the grain into the model.)

Here is a closeup of the solid wood grain detail:

We have a library of about 30 RpTreeMaker plants.

I am uploading them to the 3D warehouse. These work well with SketchUp just as 2D trees.

Download a couple and see if they work for you, or if you want to make any suggestions for improvement before I upload the rest.

They are alpha-transparent PNG image plants, with a polygon shadow mask to cast shadows. I did not include the V-Ray alpha mask because the new version of V-Ray is not supposed to need it. You might render one with V-Ray, Podium, etc. to see if they are working properly. (If you can make them work with a minor change, e.g. reversing the image, or freezing the image, then we could make that change before uploading the components)

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=dfd59a8e2e744892e05349688101e4b4