Coen,

you mentioned speed. Just wanted to throw out there that I didn't run a test on a little flash drive card but the speed is wonderful on my external hard drive. I ran AquaMark which is sort of a directx benchmarker and it ran exactly the same numbers on mojo as it did on my pc w/o using mojo. Actually it was even slightly faster on Mojo but the difference was so slight it's probably a statistical 0.

Here are the stats from my regular computer settings

Score: 78,521
GFX: 13,599
CPU: 9,287
AVG. FPS: 78.52

And from MojoPac running off my external hard drive

Score: 78,559
GFX: 13,587
CPU: 9,311
AVG. FPS: 78.56

-Brodie

I convert my pdf's to jpg.s (or whatever) using GIMP quite successfully.

-Brodie

The other possibility I can think of is whether or not your 20 scene animation is using larger tiff's than your 3 scene animation. If so, that's probably the issue. Even when you just create a single 2D image there's a size limit (which I think is based on your computer's memory rather than SU). W/ .png's I can do up to about 6000x4000 if I really want. Tiff's would probably be somewhat smaller. Not that I would do an animation w/ anything near that large.

-Brodie

Look forward to seeing it.

-Brodie

Gotcha. Yeah, I've seen another video I think of the same Architect, very interesting. I think you're on the right track w/ what you're doing and looking at.

Here's the video I referred to above. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPh7pj3onqk It's not the best example but it conveys the point pretty well w/o having to know to many fancy SU tricks.

If you're primarily looking at this as a training tool for staff on hand then I actually quite like the method that was used in the video you mentioned. She sort of walked you through the kitchen area and towards the living room. You could imagine her doing this w/ a client and explaining various features as she walked them through as a real estate agent might walk buyers through a house. So maybe something like that could work for you, or if it isn't all in-house perhaps doing an animation of the same thing while recording a voice-over and then joining the two together. I guess there's all sorts of ways to do what you're wanting is the point.

But I think the basic answer to your question seems to be, yes. I think SU is probably the tool you're looking for. It'll get you quick results w/o much of a learning curve and you shouldn't hit a dead end where you get a model finally done and then find out you can't use it. Once you've got the model you can show it directly, animate it, put in on Google Earth, put it into the 3D warehouse, make 2d images of it to print out, etc. Any other 3d program is either going to be too limited (SL or buying some $20 architecture visualization software from Best Buy) or too time consuming (learning Rhrino, Viz, or many of the other 3D modelers takes quite a long time).

To get started, I recommend what I did. I just sat down and watched some of the SU training videos (you can find them on youtube or under the help menu in SU I think) for a couple hours. You could just sit down and start into SU and teach yourself but I think eventually you'll watch some videos and kick yourself for doing things the hard way or finding things you didn't think you could do which are actually quite simple.

I also highly recommend the videos at http://www.go-2-school.com/podcasts which I just found awhile back. There very helpful and actually quite entertaining in their own right.

Good luck, feel free to keep asking questions as they come up.

-Brodie

Thanks Gaieus for the GE info. Good to know.

Stagg, that makes sense to me. Could you provide the website you're referring to? I'd like to see that sample. I guess I'm still not clear on the use. You are the facility, and you're thinking about sending this rendering job to an arch. firm (or are you doing this yourself?), then who will be the "clients"?

As far as detail, it shouldn't take a great deal of skill to achieve the level of detail I think you want. SU can make really complex models if you have lots of skill and time so I don't think the program should hinder you in that regard. It won't be Photorealistic w/o using some other programs, but it doesn't sound like you really need that. You can represent a building very well w/o having to make it photorealistic.

-Brodie

Glad to help.

My only experience w/ SL is from the Office where Dwight created a Second Second Life. However, I'd simply say that if you aren't satisfied w/ that level of detail you probably won't be satisfied with Google Earth. The GE models tend to be very simplified SU models. If you do a SU model GE might be a good secondary way of looking at it but probably not a primary way, especially since you can't do interiors.

Here's 1 of the main issues w/ going from Ext. to Interior. Usually you use a narrower field of view for Ext. (about 35 degrees) but for interiors you use something more like 60 degrees to allow you to see more of the room. If you use 35 deg for both you won't see much interior and you'll get massive clipping issues. Use 60 deg for Exterior and it'll look really distorted. All that means is that if someone just wants to zoom around and then zoom in, it might cause issues for an inexperienced user.

Another issues is that SU doesn't really do animation. So if you want to walk up to the door, have it open, and walk through, you can't. So you either walk through a closed door or you have all doors open (or just don't have doors at all, only doorway openings).

Here's what I would probably do. I'd do a SU model w/ a simple walkaround and walkthrough animation, nothing fancy and you can do it right in SU. I'd send them that along w/ a slightly customized SU file. It would have the exact same model but I'd create different Scenes (not sure if you're familiar w/ SU scenes but basically they're just different camera settings).

I'd have a scene called exterior w/ would zoom to the exterior of the building and change the field of view to 35 so they could then zoom and orbit around as they please. I'd have another called Interior which would zoom to some interior room and change the FOV to 60 degrees so they could zoom around the interior. I'd probably put in another scene w/ the roof layer turned off so they could get a broader view of how the layout worked from exterior to interior. Then I'd probably add in maybe 6 other predetermined views, so if they got stuck or couldn't figure out the zoom/orbit/pan they could at least click those scene tabs and get around to different parts of the building.

If you youtube sketchup animation you'll probably get some decent ideas of what to expect. I recall one very decent example of a church that really seemed to portray the idea well. Maybe go to youtube and search "sketchup church animation" I'll look for it later and post a link if I find it.

-Brodie

here's a little sample w/ sections on for clarity.

Section Sample.skp

The wording on this is getting pretty tricky but I think I know what you're saying.

It sounds like perhaps the issue is in getting the right section planes active at the right time. I'm unclear on the order your doing things but let's say you want the walls to grow up from the ground, then the furniture to grow up from the ground and then the exterior walls to grow up from the ground.

You're actually going to need 6 separate scenes and 6 section planes. They'll look as follows.

Scene 1. All layers OFF
Active Section plane (facing down and only in the Interior Wall group) is below all geometry (thus hiding all interior walls)

Scene 2. Interior Wall layer ON
Same as above but the Active Section Plane is above all geometry

Scene 3. Exterior wall layer OFF Interior Wall layer ON Furniture OFF
Active Section plane (facing down and only in the Furniture group) is below all geometry (thus hiding all Furniture)

Scene 4. Furniture layers ON
Same as above but the Active Section Plane is above all geometry

Scene 5. Exterior OFF Interior ON Furniture ON
Active Section plane (facing down and only in the Exterior Wall group) is below all geometry (thus hiding all Exterior Walls)

Scene 6. Exterior ON
Same as above but the Active Section Plane is above all geometry

Hope that makes things clear.

-Brodie

Edit: messed up some layer order there on the first go around

Oh ya, if you want to PM me your email address I'll see if I can send you a couple examples.

-Brodie

When you say walkthrough, I'm getting the impression you're talking about wanting them to be able to both look at and orbit around the exterior as well as be able to "walkthrough" the interior as well?

Google earth models will not have any interior geometry. I'd suggest zooming around chicago on google earth and pick a building to test out. My guess is that it won't be to the level of detail you'd want to show a client, the site is just a flat image, and it's not really intended to zoom around a single building. Also note that either way the client will have to download a program (Google Earth or Google Sketchup) and learn to navigate around.

As for time schedules on getting stuff into GE, I heard someone talking about waiting 9 months for GE to process the model before rejecting it on account of there being too much geometry. That said, I think that was some time ago and I've heard they were trying to improve so maybe today it's much speedier.

If you want someone to be able to walk around the outside and through the front door look around the living room and then maybe walk upstairs to the bedroom, that's pretty tricky w/ SU (it's pretty tricky w/ all programs really but SU has some unique issues). I'll get in to those if you want, but I should probably ask first if that's what you're looking to do. Also if you could describe the type of building that may be helpful too. Is this a big church, a residence, hotel, etc.?

Sorry, lost track of this thread. Did you ever solve the problem?

Seems very odd to me. W/ a file so small either of your machines should wiz around the model really well w/o lag. If it's not a driver issue then I'm not sure what else it could be.

-Brodie

I'd say yes and no.

Starting w/ the Google Earth part, last I heard it takes quite awhile, once you submit a model to Google earth for it to actually be reviewed and accepted and placed into the program. I believe there are also very restrictive requirements to how much geometry a model can have (they like boxes w/ textures painted on). That may be old info so if anyone else can jump in please do.

That said, it should be able to do what you want it to w/o google earth. There are 2 methods I've used w/ success.

1. create a model and use SU to create an .avi animation. Advantage is that the client doesn't need to download anything. They just open the file and the movie plays. Disadvantages; animations can take 4-8 hours easy to render & client can't manipulate the model.

2. Just send them the model and let them play with it. Advantage is that they can orbit and rotate and zoom however they want. Disadvantages; they have to download google sketchup (but, hey, it's free!) also they'res a bit of a learning curve to be able to orbit and zoom and pan (not much though, even for those who aren't real computer literate from my experience).

If you want more specifics feel free to ask.

-Brodie

how do you find the screen size/resolution? everything pretty readable and look good? And does the whole thing seem to be pretty sturdy?

-Brodie

Hardware wise you should be in good shape. As you seem to be gathering, you were probably good on both accounts before you upped your graphics card. Here's some stuff I've learned.

Speed

1. First step is, as Toby said, to check and make sure Hardware Acceleration is turned on. Then below that you'll have some settings w/ different color quality options and levels of Anti-Aliasing. For best performance pick the lowest AA setting (x0). For best appearance choose the highest (this number depends on your graphics card AND your graphics card driver). If you don't notice much difference between hardware accel. off and on, you probably have a driver issue.

2. Speaking of your driver, download the latest one from nVidia. If you think it should be doing better, though, sometimes you may want to test out some older ones or find someone on the forums w/ your graphics card and find out what driver they're happy w/.

3. Generally speaking your CPU handles the model's geometry, while your GPU handles the textures and shadows. Of those shadows should be the MUCH bigger hit to your GPU so turn them off until you need them. Textures ON shouldn't slow things down much.

4. Even w/ huge models you can go to wireframe mode and should be able to orbit around very quickly.

FILE SIZE

Note that this is different from speed but there tends to be some confusion so I want to mention it. Plus your file size seems very large. For comparisson I just did a 6 story hospital w/ a good deal of exterior detail (windows, lots of textured surfaces, finned sunshades, etc.), along w/ about 4 blocks of site showing building massings, 3d trees, people, cars, etc. and my file is just under 5,500kb. If your model isn't very very large, there is probably some stuff you can do to greatly reduce the size.

1. If you have a bunch of the exact same object, say a window, make 1 window a component and use that component for all the other windows. This will greatly decrease file size, but note that it will NOT increase speed. Your computer still has to render all of the geometry from all the windows on your screen.

2. SU stores all your textures in the skp file AND will downsize all textures that are larger than 1024x1024 down to that size. So using a 3000x3000 png is a huge waste of space. Downsize all large textures at least to 1024x1024 if not smaller and make them jpgs for the smaller file size.

3. Purge! You're not using that stuff so use the purge command to get rid of it. A couple of times I've ran into cases where everything is purged but I still have way to large of a file size. So I copy my whole model and paste it into a fresh drawing and this has done the trick.

Hope this helps! Let us know how it turns out.

-Brodie

love to hear some feedback on how this has been working out. I was looking for something like this for my wife awhile back and she may be able to use something like it again soon. It looks fantastic, and maybe I can borrow it from time to time

How's SU run on it? The ram seems a bit low and after my integrated dell graphics card issues I had I'm really wondering if the integrated graphics are decent.

Cheers!

-Brodie

installed and very impressed by mojopac! One thing I noticed was that my test model looked really choppy so I went to turn on AA and the option to turn on Hardware Acceleration was not only turned off but was grayed out so I couldn't turn it on. Others have this same issue?

I wonder if it's just a SU thing though or maybe and OpenGL thing since no one was complaining about this in relation to gaming.

Hrm...on second thought maybe it's because my mojopac "computer" doesn't have the graphics card drivers...I'll download the driver and retest when I get time.

-Brodie

For the record Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 works quite well too. I think it was $99. I typically export to .png's and use APE4.0 to compile them and add music and such, though. I can't attest to it's capacity w/ .avi's but the quality seems to be quite good so I'd be surprised if there were issues there.

-Brodie

Wonderful! It works like a charm now. Thanks so much for fixing it!

-Brodie

Great thinking. I haven't used it but I've seen it used in a tutorial recently. I believe it's only for SU 5, however if you install it it supposedly still works w/ SU 6.

Here's the link to the plug-in. It's sort of hidden since they technically they didn't update it for SU6 but as I say, word on the street is that it works for SU6 nevertheless.

Error 404 (Not Found)!!1

(sketchup.google.com)

For the tutorial I mentioned go to

http://www.go-2-school.com/podcasts Episode #33

There are also TONS of great SU tutorials on this site. I've been using SU for awhile but these tutorials are entertaining and still very informative. I found myself even watching the ones on tools and concepts that I know really well because they always seem to sneak in some little tidbit that I didn't know.

-Brodie