Posts made by brodie

Is it possible to make an object not cast shadows?

-Brodie

Thanks for the tips. Good to know it's being worked on. Andy, I'm not sure about the license restriction. With 3ds Max I can render simultaneous renders I believe but perhaps VfSU works differently. When I get a chance I'll retest and find out what the message box says exactly.

-Brodie

What sort of tricks do you guys have for sending a batch of renderings. Here are a couple scenarios.

1. Rendering a series of scenes in a single SU file. I've had issues with layers turning on and off as it switches between scenes. Is this a known issue or perhaps something file specific?

2. Rendering images from separate SU files. I've had issues when I start a second simultaneous render where it said it was "waiting" or something but the renders never picked up after the first image completed.

-Brodie

Haven't tested it yet but it looks like this plugin from honoluludesktop (still giving to the community ) should do the Make Unique portion of what we're talking about.

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=346107#p346107

-Brodie

This is probably a better solution since there are different versions of Maxwell and SU. You should be able to download the plugin including the exporter here...

http://www.maxwellrender.com/index.php/try/sketchup

-Brodie

Good point. If nothing does everything I want that may be something good for me to settle for. I'll have to poke around for something like that.

-Brodie

Dave,

I think that's pretty much my current method. My main issue with the manual method is that I tend to use a lost of nested components. So rather than just making the overall components unique I also have to dig into each main component and make all of the sub components unique as well, and sometimes sub sub components. Worse than that is when I forget to make some or all of those unique. I finish option 2 only to find out that I was inadvertently changing option 1 as well (I've put the undo button to the test many a time).

So the plugin I'm thinking would both speed things up and remove the human error. I got the idea from a nice 3ds Max layer plugin similar to the Layers Panel Beta plugin. This plugin (Nested Layer Manager) has a nice feature where you can right-click and choose to copy the layer with options to keep the components instanced or to make them unique.

-Brodie

I'm looking for a quick way to generate options. In a typical situation I generate some geometry and put it on a layer called OPT 1. I want a plugin that will copy all of that geometry onto a new layer which I'd name OPT 2. Part of what it would need to do would be to make all of the components Unique (preferably unique with respect to anything associated with OPT 1 but not unique with respect to similar components within OPT if that makes sense).

Does something like that exist?

-Brodie

In the Options Editor what's the difference between Saving your settings and Exporting them? Similarly the difference between Load and Import.

-Brodie

Thanks, that's very good to hear. I'm in a primarily SU -> 3ds Max/Vray environment but we're looking into using VfSU more as the feature set fills out. So far it looks like you've come a long way since 1.x in that regard. Keep up the good work.

-Brodie

Hrm...I just brought the same geometry in to fresh file and it did maintain the Vray material properties. Perhaps it's just an issue with the file I was importing it into?

-Brodie

I'm on 2.00.23590 which I believe is the latest.

-Brodie

Bummer. It's odd that they would leave that out since it would be a much more valuable feature in SU than Max due to poly limits.

-Brodie

If I have, say, a textured emitter in a model that I want to use in another model, what's the best way to do that?

The only way I can find is to save the material, go into my other scene and Import material, which is a fairly slow process if I have a lot of materials and for textured materials it resets the UV.

I've tried copying an object with the textured material into a new scene but that seems to strip it of it's vray material properties.

What am I missing?

-Brodie

awesome. Thanks for the help.

One more, in 3ds Max there's a Vray map called VrayEdgeTex which, among other things, can be placed in the Bump slot to produce rounded edges at render time. Is this somewhere within VfSU?

-Brodie

1. can I have a low resolution texture in sketchup that points to a high res texture that Vray uses at render time?

2. is there a trick for making my vray light planes render but not have them show up in my SU viewport?

-Brodie

We have a team of people on SU8 and we're adding someone new to the team which will require a new SU license. We have a SU8 install file but if we buy a SU2013 license will that work with SU8?

-Brodie

edit: Also, do you have to buy the $95 maintenance add on or is that optional?

I seem to be having a similar issue as others have reported.

When I installed the plugin via the link in this thread I got the

"Error Loading File attributes.rb
undefined method `GetString' for nil:NilClass"

error. So I deleted the files and installed it via the sketchucation plugin store (I'm on SU v7). It worked although the only component I could select was Susan. Based on one of the other posters I was going to try crediting a component to myself to see if that would be a workaround. After closing and reopening sketchup I now get the same error as above though and the plugin no longer shows up in my list.

-Brodie

Edit: I'm actually on SU 8

It's basically an issue of converting a SU camera to a physical camera. There's a conversion that 3ds Max isn't very good at. What I do sometimes is export the scene to Maxwell Render and check the camera properties, then convert those to my 3ds Max scene. You can use the Maxwell Render demo to do this.

-Brodie

Coming into this a bit late it looks like. I had no idea a new version was out until today. My impression is on par with the majority...YAAAAAAWWWN

I'm not one to be overly negative but it feels like it's been a long time since I've really seen a tool developed that applies to me. And I'm in architectural visualization, so not exactly on the outskirts of the target community. With Google, it felt like they were just concerned with filling up Google Earth. I had some high hopes that the Trimble folks would fall more inline with my own hopes for SU. I'm a bit fearful now that Layout may prove to be their Google Earth which sucks up the majority of the development time and interests me not at all. I hope that's not the case but it looks like I'll have to wait another year to have a better gauge.

I understand the value of the extension warehouse. It's a big deal. It just feels underwhelming since we JUST got that not long ago from the sketchucation folks. So it effectively adds nothing new from what I can tell.

I don't really care about the licensing things. Sketchup is still inexpensive and I wouldn't expect to do Pro work with a free software. In fact, I wouldn't necessarily want to. More money should mean more/faster/better development.

Many are speculating that this was mostly an 'under the hood' release so that Trimble can REALLY do what they want next time. I have 2 issues with that.

1. we've always been told to rest assured that the sketchup team has been unchanged since the @Last days and so there is consistency. A vast 'under the hood' overhaul in order to make future changes seems to suggest a lack of consistency.

2. That's fine if you want to do that, but why charge an upgrade fee for a 'set up' for a future product. It feels like getting charged twice. Like if McDonalds charged me the price of a burger once when they killed the cow, and then again, after they made it into a tasty burger.

3. Bonus: I here a couple people mentioning some reserved comments about possible performance and stability increases. I'd fully support a new version in which there were no really sexy changes to speak about, but under the hood there were some truly significant upgrades.

I sympathize with Jason's argument and hope to keep him in the community, but my own feelings are much more mitigated. The truth is that SketchUp was a very good architectural modeling tool years ago and architecture hasn't changed much since then. With each unimpressive release, I don't feel SU becoming LESS useful to me. I just don't feel like it's becoming any MORE useful to me. I don't want to be unimpressed. I'm not looking to gripe about new features. I wantto support SU and Trimble in the direction they're going. Unfortunately this release doesn't feel like it's goneanywhere.

-Brodie