also just noticed that this topic has already been discussed in this thread: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=43219 ::blushes:: whoops!

from Paul on the SketchUp Extensibility Team:

@unknownuser said:

Yes, I believe that would work fine. However, I recommend using the Entity member entityID instead, like this: Sketchup.active_model.definitions.entityID. This one also doesn't persist between sessions, but it is a unique index across all entities Sketchup has loaded (even with multiple models), and active_model.definitions is a SketchUp entity.

Just got a reply form Paul on the SketchUp Extensibility Team:

@unknownuser said:

Yes, I believe that would work fine. However, I recommend using the Entity member entityID instead, like this: Sketchup.active_model.definitions.entityID. This one also doesn't persist between sessions, but it is a unique index across all entities Sketchup has loaded (even with multiple models), and active_model.definitions is a SketchUp entity.

So there we go, a unique (even across multiple models) ID that we can rely upon! Thanks for pointing me in that direction.

The definitions object_id never changes in a given session? I just tried to find a case where it changes, and I can't find one, but I'm scared to make that assumption if it's not true 100% of the time. I don't want to use the window title, because you can have two files with the same title, or no title at all. None of this needs to be human readable, I just need to be able to differentiate between the windows reliably, quickly, and with as little code as possible. I do like just using a value in the SU model, rather than having to modify or retrieve an attribute dictionary value. I prefer to avoid modifying attribute dictionaries when possible, as that can lead to some plugin conflicts.

Hello everyone,

I am about to start working on improving our OSX support for V-Ray for SketchUp. The biggest issue we have on that platform, is the way SketchUp handles multiple documents being open at the same time. We make our own materials that correspond to SketchUp materials that are in the model, and we also have a set of render options which we attach to the model. On Windows, it's simple, each model gets it's own instance of SketchUp, so inherently everything is separate and clean. On OSX, since our plugin gets loaded once, regardless of how many models are open, our information gets rather confused.

So I am not sure how to fix this. We need to do 2 things:

1. know how many models are open, and how to identify each one in a unique and per-session constant way. The model guid changes when the model is modified or saved, and the path is empty if the user has never saved the model to disk. Both of those are useless for this case.

2. know when a user switches from working in one model, to the next, so we can update our UI and show the proper render options and materials for that current scene.

We have been scratching our heads about this for the past couple of years, and now that we are approaching a final release candidate, we would like to try to tackle this issue if we can. Does anyone have any ideas?

For a possible workaround for #2, we could check the SketchUp.active_model when our UI gets focus. For a possible workaround for #1, we could perhaps attach a guid string that we make, to the model's attribute dictionary. I was really hoping that there would be some sort of built in SketchUp functionality that would let us know what is going on though.

Best Regards,
Devin Kendig
Developer
Chaos Group

Blender

this caught my eye, not sure how to support it with V-Ray though... http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2011/02/proper-animation-is-very-cool-plugin.html

The "not responding" message means that SketchUp is busy, and unable to respond to any input what so ever. That's because we are using every possible bit of processing power and memory that is allocated to SketchUp, in order to process the scene and render as quickly as possible.

how are you making the grass, and do you have a scene file to share so we can look at what is going on in the scene?

@unknownuser said:

When I click the Render button it takes several seconds to start rendering and system tray shows me "not responding" for sketchup , but it starts rendering after (let's say) 15 secs . There is also a message says : " V-ray is currently processing your scene , please wait... " .

That is normal. V-Ray has to grab all of the information in the sketchup file, and convert it into something that can be rendered. All rendering engines require some time to process the scene prior to rendering. In our 1.6 beta, we have added some additional features and optimizations that cut down on the delay significantly.

@unknownuser said:

when I installed v-ray it causes a big delay to SK launching
Yes, our plugin loads when you launch SketchUp, and it takes a bit of time to load dependencies and get our plugin up and running. You can disable our plugin in the Window->Preferences window. Click on Extensions and then uncheck V-Ray for SketchUp. Note, unloading our plugin requires you to restart SketchUp.

can you reliably reproduce this issue by following certain steps? I can't fix what I can't reproduce, I'm still not getting this error in my tests.

quite possible, our latest nightly build has some changes to resolve some plugin conflicts (we had quite a few), and the next public beta version will have those fixes. If you're interested in trying out a nightly build to see if that resolves your issues, send me a pm please.

Most of our OSX users are aware of this, but you're right, the information isn't really in anyone's face. It needs to be fixed! The info is out there somewhere for the 1.49.01 version, I know our support guys are aware of it at least. It's been an issue since our first OSX version. I would like to have this issue resolved prior to releasing 1.6 as a final release though.

The issue is our asset table that is connected to the scene. We rely on being loaded to do some initialization stuff. Since our plugin is only loaded once, we only have one asset table. Then when a second window is opened, everything from that second instance is tossed in to our asset table, and there are tons of references to things that don't exist in the new model. When you switch back to the first model, everything from the second model messes up the first one... it's just awful. The longer you work with more than one window open, the worse it gets. Eventually you end up with an awful scene, or a bug splat.

We don't modify geometry in the scene, so I don't understand how this is something we are doing. Disappearing from the RT render, I understand, that's our representation of the scene, but modifying the actual scene? I don't see how we could be doing this.

V-Ray doesn't use web dialogs, and I am unable to reproduce the issue at all on my machine. We don't handle multiple windows of SU being open on OSX at all, because they have an entirely different way of doing things under that environment. It's something we would like to address soon, but so far have found no simple solution for it. We support 1 SU window open on OSX at a time. If you do open a second window, you will corrupt your scene, get crashes, and other horrible things. Thomthom's utility will likely not be helpful at all with the way the OSX version of SU works.

In response to that old thread:
No, we do not handle the way SketchUp on Mac handles multiple SU instances being open at the same time... it will cause scene corruption, crashes, and other horrible things to happen... You get 1 SketchUp instance only, Thomthom's utility probably won't do any good in this instance at all. Just don't do it. One SU window only on OSX if V-Ray is loaded.

In response to this thread:
I have no idea what that white dialog is, and I am unable to reproduce it so far on my own machine.

I was able to look at Make's scene, I was unable to reproduce the crash running OSX Lion, SketchUp 2013, and our latest nightly build.

gspalding - sorry you're having trouble on the CG forums, but you don't have to worry about jumping through those hoops to report a bug. Just send us an email: vfswip@chaosgroup.com will submit to our bug tracker, which we use exclusively for tracking down and fixing bugs in V-Ray for SketchUp. Forums and email aren't used to track/fix bugs at all, so if you only wanted to report a bug, there's no reason to even post about it on any forums at all, because Joe (the other developer) and I don't use those forms of communication for that purpose. If you have steps to reproduce the issue, or an example scene file that can be used to reproduce the issue on our machines, please send in a bug report so we can fix this. If the scene is too large, just start deleting things until it's about 10mb in size, and then send it along. The less complex a scene is, that still demonstrates the issue, the better.

What version of V-Ray for SketchUp are you using? Does this happen with the default materials that come with SketchUp? Does this happen in a fresh scene with just a box?

make - I honestly haven't had time to investigate that report yet. I've been trying to resolve some nasty plugin conflicts that are destroying our stability and causing crashes left and right in both Windows and OSX at the moment. It's taken me a bit longer than I had expected to track down the conflict, but I have some help from TIG, Fredo, Thomthom, and the Sketchup Extensibility Team now, so I'm hoping we will be able to make short work of it from here. I will be looking at your report next, or very very soon though, as it is another crash bug, which has a very high priority.