Those are all some really good images. A few things I noticed to consider

The chair image seems a bit grainy. Maybe it's just the fabric texture, I can't tell.

I really like the prison cell sort of image a lot. Great texture on the wall with the window. After looking at it for awhile the ceiling texture seems a bit funny though. Not sure if it's the lighting, but it looks the same as the texture on the right wall but with grooves at a different angle. I would expect to see something without the grooves up there.

Scrolling down I had the unusual circumstance of being able to see that bent grid structure against the sky before seeing it's connection to the ground plane. I have to say that I think I liked it better before I saw it against the ground plane. I would either rethink how it connects to the ground (sort of abrubt and at a weird spot on the grid) or even just cut the image off above the ground plane altogether. The second option might go well with some of your other more abstract images.

On the block model turning AA from x4 to x0 actually slowed down my fps? Something weird is going on that I haven't figured out yet. On the other hand turning the transparency quality to fast or off helped a ton.

-Brodie

@jhauswirth said:

@unknownuser said:

1. Render 2048x1536 .png files at 29.97 fps.
   -Brodie

Why such a high-res animation? Are you transfering to film and displaying
in a movie theatre? The best HD TV only does 1920x1080.

I watch all my animations in a movie theatre, that's just how I roll.

Seriously though, I've found that outputing them at a large resolution and then scaling them down seems to help with the moire affect and crispness. The former can be a big problem with a 6 story brick building.

-Brodie

I was just playing around zooming in on your renderings and stuff and, again, they really are great. As someone else mentioned already, your grass is really impressive, even more so zoomed in! The way you've integrated the building as it meets the grass is really great.

My favorite though is on the first couple images of the house. While I was zoomed in panning around i noticed that you'd even put in what seems to be a little weed where the brick meets the driveway in between the garage door and the entrance area! (you can just barely see this at 100%.

Yeah, remus is right on. Below 15 fps will probably be pretty choppy. 30 fps will take a long time to render but will be nice and smooth.

-Brodie

@jackson said:

@bellwells said:

Looks like I'm the slow kid on the block with my 4 year old Sony Laptop, 1.73 Ghz, 1Gb, GeForce Go 6200, hardware and feedback turned on and AA at 4x.
The AA will make a huge difference, I'm amazed you have it turned on at all on your laptop. My lappie is coming up for 3 years old and I always have AA turned off- I can't afford the slow frame rate when working and as much as x 4 AA'd lines look lovely I much prefer the fine crisp aliased lines- I find them much easier to select. Of course I apply AA or resize in PS for presentation images and animations.

I'd be interested to see what your fps results would be if you go back and forth between x0 and x4 AA. I ran the script both ways and was shocked to find almost no difference at all (x4 was actually fasterbut probably well within
the margin of error).

-Brodie

That sort of thing has happened to me before. Eventually I deleted the whole thing just to see what would happen and my file was still crazy big. What I did was turn on all the layers copy everything and paste it into a fresh skp file - sort of a super-purge!

-Brodie

@davidboulder said:

I've found when I make a change to a texture (like transparency or name) I have to tab into another field within that texture or my changes don't stick? maybe that is what is happening to you.

I'm on mac

Yeah, that's true for pc's as well

I don't think there are a lot of great options. Here are the one's I can think of.

1. Create the scenes in SU, send them the file, and let them play the animation right in SU. This is probably the fastest, easiest way. Disadvantage is that depending on your model this can make for a pretty jumpy animation plus they have to have SU installed and know how to play the animation.

2. Most user friendly would be to create scenes and do a file->export->animation and save it as an avi file or something that the other person can just click a button and play. Disadvantage is that this can take quite awhile to render the animation (turning shadows off will probably help significantly)

3. You could basically combine those by just running through the scenes in your SU model or even just manually panning around your model while running some sort of screen capture program. This might be the best/easiest solution but the quality may suffer quite a bit so that's the compromise. I also don't know much about the screen capturing software to be able to recommend a good free one.

Those are about the only options I can think of. Incidently what I do for animations is I export the animation as a series of .png files and then compile them with Adobe Premiere Elements ($99). Good quality but there's a little be of a learning curve to it if this is a one time thing. It also take a bit more time than just having SU compile everything for you and export it directly as an avi.

-Brodie

I'm using the 8800 GT and it's working just fine for me. I got it after having huge issues with my ATI card (I would try and select a face and it would select a face several layers behind). The nVidia also has some many more adjustments I can make via nTune.

-Brodie

@itsjustme said:

Is there any way to create a walk through and be able to play it so as to show someone else the building. i do know there is the animation tool that allows you to make different scenes. but is there any faster way to record a walk through? any suggestions will be great

Are you showing someone on your computer or sending them a file? What sort of quality are you looking for?

-Brodie

I recently ran across a script Test.time_display which orbits around in 72 frames, and then will report a number of stats including total time it took and your overall FPS.

What I'm hoping to create is a benchmark .skp file which could be posted and used by people here to compare how their system does compared to other folks and get a better grasp on the affects of shadows and materials and geometry in relation to their CPU and GPU as well as various settings.

I want to create a file with 8 scenes and have the ruby script run Test.time_display on each scene and then post the results from each scene at the end (if it could post them to a .txt file or something like that, that would be ideal).

As a side note but related it would also be great to have a script that would do a similar report of various settings if that's possible. Hardware Acceleration ON/OFF Anti-Aliasing x0/x2/x4/etc. that sort of thing.

Are these things possible?

-Brodie

@dale said:

@plot-paris said:

can you check, if the "Enable Transparency" checkbox is activated (styles window > face settings).

otherwise, could you upload the model?

cheers,

Jakob

HI plot-paris
Yes, the enable transparency is on in styles.
I am uploading a copy of the storefront doors with texture as described. The model was started before I went to SketchUp Basecamp, and has all the trademarks of how to make a model with a huge file size, so I won't try to upload the whole thing. Hopefully this is enough for you to work with. Thanks

I didn't have a problem. In the materials window I selected the eyedropper and picked one of your window materials, went to the Edit tab in the Materials window and adjusted the opacity down to like 62% and it seems to be working fine.

-Brodie

Storefront%20doors[1].skp

@unknownuser said:

I'd missed this post before with your benchmark file. I ran the ruby I mentioned ( Test.time_display ) with shadows and textures on (although I don't think there are any textures) a few times and got an fps between 23.0 and 23.5 in scene 1. In scene 7 I got a 0.2 fps which took an agonizing 404 seconds to cycle through. Even without shadows on I only got a 0.5 fps which took 158 seconds.

-Brodie

I'm beginning to question my sanity. Nothing seems to make sense with my results. On my home home computer which is in every way inferior to my work computer I actually got better results. On scene 7, for example, my fps was still 0.2 but it took 377s instead of 404s which is noticable.

The only thing I can think of is maybe there's a fair sized difference in performance in running on a lower screen resolution. I'll test that later and see what I get.

-Brodie

@plot-paris said:

I just did some tests and found out, that the consistency increases immensly with the poly count.

some figures:

my city-model, scene 1 (3.328 polygons):

framerate differed from 53.7 fpsto 56.9 fps(maximum difference in time 0.093 seconds)

the same model, scene 2 (180.496 polygons; more than 50 x bigger):

framerate always was 2.5 fps(maximum difference in time 0.067 seconds)

here we see, that the dime was more precise than in the low poly scene...

I think that would be my reason for wanting a semi-complex benchmark. I like your idea about having a number of scenes with varying complexities and a script that would run the Test.time_display script, log the results, cycle to next scene, etc. and give you a final report at the end (in a txt file would be great). Also like you said, in conjunction something that could along with that log your settings would be fabulous.

I'm thinking 8 scenes. First 4 would be a pretty simple model which would run the 4 combos of textures and shades on/off. The next 4 scenes would be the same thing but with a more complex model.

I think something like your city model would be fine although I think all those punched openings are probably more intensive than necessary for the shadows. Also adding textures so we could get a feel for that as well.

I think what that would do would give us a better idea of the affect that the CPU and GPU have on the varying geometry, materials, and shadows.

As far as settings the following is what I'd consider standard...

GPU Settings
Clock Speed: Default
Fan Speed: 100%
3D Settings: Default

SU Settings
Anti-Aliasing: x0 (or perhaps x4?)
Hardware Acceleration: ON

Display Settings
Resolution: 1200x1024

CPU Settings
External Programs Running: NONE

-Brodie

@jackson said:

How did you find out about that? That's fantastic!

It came from some random little post on these boards actually. I think I'd searched for "benchmark" or something and in a conspicuous thread about benchmark's someone was just like...um, why don't you just run this ruby? Didn't look like anyone even took note of it at the time.

-Brodie

Great job! Could you talk a bit about your process? How do you transition from SU to Maxwell?

@plot-paris said:

we just need someone to write a script that puts the framerate in a text-file (I have unfortunately not the slightest idea of how to do anything in ruby).
the best way to put it, would be something like:

• scene1 to scene2 = 76 fps
• scene2 to scene3 = 44 fps
• scene3...

and then we need a nice test-file that not only tests your hardware, but also makes testing enjoyable (like starting with a small village with few simple houses, going to a city of decent size and finishing with a huge capital (loads of polygons) with a big castle or cathedral in the centre...

(that is a nice idea for the competition thread)

[Edit] I just used an old model to demonstrate, how such a scene could look like. of course it would be much more enjoyable, if you had a bit more variety... but as I said, this is only a first idea[]

I just spotted a problem (I think). how much do components affect cpu and ram? because the file size should be rather small for fast download - therefore should consist of components... but can we test all necessary information with that?

[Edit] I just used an old model to demonstrate, how such a scene could look like. of course it would be much more enjoyable, if you had a bit more variety... but as I said, this is only a first idea[]

[attachment=0:2l8h71rs]<!-- ia0 -->benchmark_test.skp<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:2l8h71rs]

I'd missed this post before with your benchmark file. I ran the ruby I mentioned ( Test.time_display ) with shadows and textures on (although I don't think there are any textures) a few times and got an fps between 23.0 and 23.5 in scene 1. In scene 7 I got a 0.2 fps which took an agonizing 404 seconds to cycle through. Even without shadows on I only got a 0.5 fps which took 158 seconds.

-Brodie

Couple other odd things I've found so far...

1. Overclocking my card didn't really do anything. Some results were slightly worse, some slightly better. Probably well within the margin of error.

2. Turning Fast Feedback OFF actually improved my FPS by about 30%

3. Turning my anti-aliasing up (from x0 to x4) either didn't affect performance or may have actually improved it slightly.

These are all pretty counterintuitive to me but I've yet to be able to explain them away given the results I'm getting.

-Brodie

As a side note, I'm going to run some tests on a coworkers computer when I get a chance. He has the same setup as me with 3 gigs of processor speed instead of 2. Be interesting to see what difference that makes.

-Brodie