Tig,

You have been a busy bee - I felt compelled to donate!

Before I got the Pro version, I always found it best to take a screen grab of what I wanted to print!

I should like SU to handle geometry in small dimensions accurately, without needing the work-around of scaling up/down to fix it. I don't always remember to do this at the time of creating the geometry and it's irritating to have to go back and fix something where a face hasn't been created etc.

I apologise if this isn't considered a performance issue.

@andrews said:

@chrisjk said:

Please, please, make SU capable of using all my CPU cores!

What specific operations do you believe would be best served by adding multi-core utilization? 3D is an inherently GPU-heavy endeavor and most real-time editing, orbiting, etc., can't really be improved with extra CPU cores. There are some areas where multi-core strategies can be applied; I'm just curious what items stand out in your mind.

Andrew

Andrew,

I notice it in the Rubies thing discussed above but not being a Ruby developer, I confess I do not know if it’s a CPU or a GPU bottleneck.

Please, please, make SU capable of using all my CPU cores!

Scott, Modelhead,

Thank you very much - some great recommendations there. It is clear that Photoshop (or it's various cousins - I'm on a Mac and using Gimp, Pixelmator etc.) is pretty essential. I have had some success with Gimp by taking a basic board, and copying/modifying it in various ways to create larger panels. Gimp's Liquid resixe and bump maps help create some pretty good looking images that then serve fairly well for the size of furniture I am working with at the moment.

This will be a superb tool - looking forward very much to it!

Hi Brian,
Those are great links - spot on! Thank you very much.

@mm5949 said:

It took me a while, but I finally learned the "Intersect with Model" tool. This is a good (only?) way to make accurate mortise and tenons for woodworking. It's explained on page 222 of the (downloadable...887 pages!) SU User's Guide which I downloaded from the official SU website (at http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=116174). It is a powerful tool.

To save the palaver of deleting a lot of unwanted geometry after using an intersect operation, I find Bool Tools from Smustard indispensable.

Not entirely sure I have understood exactly what you want but the plugin k-tools can be used to draw a logarithmic spiral like this

Then you can use the Control points plugin to add points like this

and then you can pull these up with the move tool - I just pulled up the one in the centre.

I have a bunch of great plugins, mainly thanks to the prolific authors who give so generously of their work here in SCF. I love them so much I want their toolbars on permanent display and on my 30 inch screen I have plenty of room for them. The problem is that some are of the shy retiring kind and on firing up Sketchup, I keep having to go to "View -> Tool Palettes -> the relevant plugin" and tell it to display the toolbar.

Some plugins, on the other hand always put up their toolbar. I have looked at the Ruby code and can see a number of differences between those that remember their toolbar visibility and those that don't but it's not all that consistent and not being any kind of coder am reluctant to play around with it. I wonder if there is a snippet of code someone could provide that I could add to the shy plugins to either get them to remember to show their toolbar if I have it switched on via View -> Tool Palettes or alternatively to force them to show their tool bar every time?

I am on a Mac, if that makes any difference.

Gai,

Thank you. I have seen Madhav's textures and indeed have downloaded and used a few. The main problem with them as shown is that they lack dimensional information but are in any case of rather small pieces judging by the size of the grain patterns.

What I am seeking - at least insofar as the "raw material" is concerned is better demonstrated by photos like the ones below. These come from a vast collection of wood images nearly all of which have dimensional information - or at least clues - provided. What I miss is the step that takes me from these images to good textures.

Thanks d12dozr. It's not really what I had in mind although it goes partway to what I am after.

The problem with real wood grains is that they don't tile at all realistically if they have a nice figure and pictures of small pieces look awful if they are painted onto a large area (either tiled or scaled up). A related problem is that when using several instances of a single component, the repetition of the same pattern looks very artificial.

It may be that I am seeking the impossible and that one simply has to amass a large number of good quality photos of wood of large sizes and apply these to faces, sliding the textures around to a pleasing effect.

There remains the problem of ensuring that the wood has a bit of character using a bump/normal map and I am definitely stuck here although I guess that is more of a question for the KT forum than SCF (I have read the materials editor guide but am stuck before I start - it doesn't tell me how to turn a photo into a materials library that I can then edit.)

I use a Mac Pro and found that the instructions given here http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=16015&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=mac+preview#p138040 worked as described.

As to speed, I came from a Windows desktop machine to a 17" MacBook Pro three years ago and found the Mac far faster. I now use a Mac Pro desktop machines with 8 cores and 8GB Ram and that is far faster than the MacBook Pro in most tasks, however SU will only use one core so in that respect, I don't think there is any speed advantage gained from the power of the machine - plainly memory is adequate. I don't feel the Mac is slower than my Windows machine at all.

You could try SU in a Windows virtual machine on your Mac for comparison. I have several Windows VMs on my Mac (currently using Parallels V5) and I find them far faster than my Windows PC ever was.

Have a look at this thread too http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=20076

I'd be grateful if someone could point me to a site, a book or other tuition material that would teach me about creating realistic wood textures for use on furniture models.

I am a complete newbie at rendering but have been having fun playing with Kerkythea and using SU materials mainly but also some materials that I imported as textures based on photos of different woods. However they are lacking in many ways, in particular, photos of wood gleaned from the Internet are often of small pieces and they tile and scale horribly in SU (and KT) and they come with no bump maps or normal maps.

I can probably take pictures from my own woodpile to get the sizes right but the texture mapping is something else. I think the materials editor in KT will probably let me accomplish quite a bit but to be honest I am not seeking to become a great expert - just an informed user, if such a thing exists - so I have skated over the theory somewhat.

Ideally, I'd like a program that takes a photo of wood and turns it into something KT - or another renderer will use and provide decent results with. If this is a pipe dream and it's starting to seem like that, then I'd be interested in finding out the easiest way to do it from the ground up in as simple a way as possible.

Chris

Ward,
I see them in FF OK. (FF 3.5.7 on a Mac)

Chris

@plot-paris said:

its just a matter of small things that add up, really, like that with Mac OS I can't delete a file by hitting the delete button (I either have to use context click or drag it into the bin) or I haven't got a proper task manager, where I can see how much memory or CPU a program is using... that sort of stuff.
I think Windows Vista would have failed this comparisson. but Windows 7 just got there for me
(although I have to say that I am slightly biased for I've been using Win since 3.11).

I don't really follow this - Command-backspace does file delete and Activity Monitor does what the Windows Task Manager does.

Chris

I use Firefox and there is a great add-on called Zotero that I use to save pages for offline use. It has all sorts of handy features including a good tagging and search facility that allows you to find stuff filed ages ago without difficulty. One especially good thing about it is that it doesn't reload pages on capture - just uses what you have already got showing in your browser, so it's good for capturing stuff from websites that have ephemeral cookies (like receipts for online transactions etc.).

Frontface.rb is useful too.

Chris

Doesn't the entity info window do what you need?

Chris