Definitely!

The IRender material settings are saved on the SketchUp Material as an attribute, so:

1. All materials with the same name in the drawing will be modified at the same time.

2. If you place the same material on a new face, it will have the settings.

3. If you save the material, it should save the attributes into the library, but that is not working correctly. (SketchUp seems to be saving just one attribute. We will have to look into this more. We are also working on a button to save the material as an IRender material. For now, if you want to use the material in a different model, you will have to copy a face containing the material from one model and paste it in the second model.)

@ross macintosh said:

Looks really good Al. I'll be sure to give the demo a try when I have my christmas break.

I'm wondering about workflow. When you've tweaked a material is there any way to save it to be reapplied to something else later? If I use the wizard to set one material can I use SketchUp's eyedropper to assign that same tweaked material to another surface?

Regards, Ross

IRender and IRender Plus produce very good images.

Take a look at our image gallery for some of the images our customers have created:

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The images I make are not very good for several reasons:

1 I am a programmer, not a graphics artist

2. I am mildly color blind - so I tend to create images with harsh colors which I can see better.

3. I usually produce images to highlight a particular feature.

I hope you will give IRender a 30 day free trial to see what images it will produce for you.

@unknownuser said:

The material editor is a very nice touch. The images on your site, however, I find rather unconvincing. Sorry if this sounds a bit unfriendly, but, er, the Plus version costs 449 $ - for that kind of money, it should be able to produce far better images.

We have several settings which apply to reflective materials.

• Reflection itself - this is the mirror like reflection of other objects

• Highlight intensity or Shininess - This controls "highlights" from the reflection of light sources. This is probably the one closest to Glossiness - it is the intensity of the highlight

• Highlight Sharpness or Intensity-Y - this is how sharp or fuzzy the highlight is.

• Highlight Type - White, Metallic or colored - this determines the color of the highlight.

Whats nice about the new Wizard is that you can change all of these and quickly see the effect in the render preview window at the right.

I added a section to the RPS Wiki showing the effect of reflection, highlight intensity and highlight sharpness. http://forums.renderplus.com/wiki/index.php?title=Highlighting

We have released the Version 2.0 of IRender and IRender Plus

This version fixes a number of bugs in the current release, and also renders some SketchUp models which were too large for version 1.0.

The biggest new feature is the new Material Wizard which make is much easier to create reflective and/or transparent materials such as Metal, Plastic and Glass.

We are really excited about this new material editor which renders each material as you change its settings, (so you can immediately see what effect reflection, highlighting, etc. will have),and saves the setting in SketchUp for automatic use when rendering.

It starts with any colors, textures and transparency already set in SketchUp, then lets you quickly choose presets for metal, plastic, glass, etc. and then fine tune additional settings for each material. (Frankly, after working on IRender for more than 2 years, we did not know nearly as much about materials as we learned while creating and implementing this new wizard. )

For instance, plastic has several settings besides just reflection, such as sharpness, which controls the highlighting.

See: http://forums.renderplus.com/wiki/index.php?title=Material_Wizard for more information on the Material Wizard.

See: http://forums.renderplus.com/wiki/index.php?title=IRender_V2.0 for a summary of other new features.\

Trial Version

IRender 2.0 has a new 30 day trial version. If you have tried IRender before, you can have a new trial for Version 2.0.

Downloads

Visit: http://www.renderplus.com/pdf/download.htm to download the latest version.

@lekonna said:

However the model should be always solid so it would be enough for me to just check the normals of the faces and compare those to the camera and if they are not opposite i could just reverse the face.

If you imagine a box with 6 faces which are all aligned correctly, the 3 faces which are visible would have their normals match the camera and the three faces which are invisible would have their normals the opposite of the camera. So the "trick" is to determine which faces are visible, and which faces are obstructed by other faces.

Todd Burch was working of a script to solve this problem, but I never heard if he got it finished.

I don't know any easy way to determine if a face is visible or obscured in a particular view.

By special features, I meant things that it wouldn't do yet.

The main special feature now is the 4 ways of creating the 3D PDF

1. • Just the 3D PDF itself - this is good for embedding into Web pages.
     (And a "special feature" we could add would be to create the HTML code for embedding the PDF into the web page for people who would rather copy and paste HTML code into their web pages.)
2. • The 3D image area with titles, captions and body text.

3. The 3D image placed onto a raster background. You create a raster image for a background and place the 3D image on top of the other image.

4. Both a Background image and text. This is helpful for putting images at the top, left and bottom of a page, adding the 3D image and then adding titles and captions.

See: http://forums.renderplus.com/wiki/index.php?title=RPS_3D_PDF_Tutorial_-_Page_Layout

Another important feature we added recently is "batch mode"

This lets you automatically create several 3D PDFs from saved .SKP files in a single operation. You create a batch file with the .SKP file names, the .PDF file names and a saved settings file, push a button and create all the 3D PDFs at once.

One of our clients has a library of 3D symbols and is using this to create 3D PDFs for each symbol which can be used by clients to preview the .SKP file before downloading it.

See: http://forums.renderplus.com/wiki/index.php?title=RPS_3D_PDF_Docmentation#Batch_Mode

Thanks Joe,

I'll pass your name along.

Let me know if there are any special features, etc. you need to make this work

We have a request from a SketchUp user who wants to make 3D PDFs, but does not have a Windows machine. (RPS 3D PDF requires windows).

Is there anyone who would like to help him out?

I will point him to this thread to see if anyone has responded...

@unknownuser said:

I Really need to create 3D PDFs for a Project but I am a Mac User. I am not a professional at this stuff and I was wondering if you all have some type of a Service that creates 3D PDFs FOR People who need it. Perhaps you can suggest a place where I can locate a RPS systems Consultant who works in My area ( NYC ) I am working on something that is Educational and It would be enhanced GREATLY if I could find someone to do these for me at a reasonable cost. I have already created my rudimentary model in SketchUp already but I need additional resources which I Just do not have to create the tools that I need.

Thanks for all the information.

Umlauts and other accents are more of a problem then I expected.

I am going to look into some things and I will report back. It looks like they are supported in Ruby and SketchUp for some things, but then lost for some other things.

Thanks Todd.

Is "M3" Version 6.0.1099 (for Windows). If so, then it still has the problem I reported.

I am having a problem process a file which has an Umlaut in the file name.

If I replace the 'ä'in the file name with 'ae' then it works, but, of course, I cannot expect clients to change their path names.

(I indented the Ruby Console responses to make this easier to read.)
(The first file name is not recognized as a legitimate file.)

sfile1 = UI.openpanel
    C;\Klär\test1
File.exists?(sfile1)
    false

sfile2 = UI.openpanel
    C;\Klaer\test2
File.exists?(sfile2)
    true

This has nothing to do with the use of UI.openpanel. It fails if I just include the path name directly:

File.exists?("c;\\Klär\\test1")
    false

File.exists?("c;\\Klaer\\test2")
    true

Any ideas?

Have German users had problems locating other files with SketchUp in paths with Umlauts?

Here is an interesting "feature" of the SketchUp Length class:

l1 = 0.00.to_l # create a 0 Length
l2 = 0.000001.to_l
l1 == l2 # returns true

although they are reported as equal, they print as different values.

This showed up when trying to determine when a normal vector was 0
v1 = Geom::Vector3d.new(0,0,0)
v1.length < 0.00001 # returns false

Bill,

Were you ever able to save the .SKP where you wanted them?

I tried saving it with the base name (xxx.skp) and no path. I don't think it resaved it, althoug it returned true.

sname = File.basename(sfile)
model.save(sname)

I then saved it with new names using:

component_name = File.basename(sfile,".*")
sname = component_name + "_new.skp"
model.save(sname)

This seems to have worked (saving a new SKP in the original folder)

I looked briefly at the sitemap stuff, but I'm not sure how to implement it for a Forum and a Wiki, which are our main sites.

I need to look around on the web to see how to make sitemaps for Forums and Wikis.

Thanks for the link to Google Webmaster Tools. I had registered one of my sites before, but added the other two.

I added Enhanced Image Searches (which i presume you have done already).

And now I am having fun seeing which external web pages link to my web pages.

Thanks again...

Actually the Torii image has been there a long time. The new images are not in the Google search database yet.

If you want to find out if a page is in the search engine, use a site search. (site:xxx.yyy.com rest of search) (You can do a site search for images, or on the full web)

For instance, searching for: site:forums.renderplus.com torii (URL: http://www.TinyURL.com/22tclj) finds the page, but searching for site:forums.renderplus.com dojo does not find the new stuff.

This shows that the three new images and links are not in the search database yet.

Similarly, searching the SUC site for site:www.sketchucation.com "Moon Gate Page" does not find this thread.

Joe,

Your web sites have links to the PDF files. You may want to try embedding the PDF file in a web page. This lets you put other items on the page, images, instructions, links, etc..

The user can navigate the PDF file directly from the web browser, rather than from Adobe Reader.

See the sample here: http://www.renderplus.com/pdf/pdf_sample2.htm

The code to embed the PDF files is basically this:

<code>
<EMBED src="http://woodsshop.com/MoonGate/MoonGate_Kit/documents/Moon_Gate_KIT.pdf" width="700" height="500" href="http://woodsshop.com/MoonGate/MoonGate_Kit/documents/Moon_Gate_KIT.pdf"/>
</code>

Sorry,

I meant to edit it and add the link - but I got tied up eating dinner.

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OK, I gave you top billing on the RPS Wiki.

Hopefully, (in a few weeks), it will help your Google search score!

IRender is at: http://forums.renderplus.com/wiki/index.php?title=IRender

You can download a trial version from: http://www.renderplus.com/pdf/download.htm

Let us know if you have any problems or need any helo..

IRender Plus currently works with .RPC files, but not with the new ArchVision "All Access" mode.