This is a great little free seamless texture maker.

Perfect for quick and dirty texture making:

Texture Studio
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=46368

@unknownuser said:

sounds good. how do you load it into modo?

To load it into modo, go to the modo menu: FILE/IMPORT CONFIG

Enjoy

I wanted to follow up on this thread and say that I ended up actually with DoubleCad XT 3 despite my initial misgivings.

I decided to bite the bullet and buy the training videos for DoubleCad. It turned out to be a solid move. They are easy to follow and well worth $50.

3 pros for DoubleCad:

-free, unless you want the added features. (so I had time to get used to it's "quirks")
-easy integration with Sketchup
-fast with 5-10 meg SKP files(v3 might be better with larger files, haven't tried that yet)

1 con:

-not as stable as I would like. I understand software bugs, I've never met a program that didn't crash sometimes. Overall I'd say the bugs are not the end of the world, but take some time to experiment with your workflow before any big projects or you might regret it.

If there are any other Sketchup and modo users out there, here is the modo configuration file I have been working on.

This CFG changes modo to have Sketchup-like navigation. Not a lot has been changed. Mostly I just changed the rotate/pan etc. to be based around MMB and modifiers, and changed any tools triggered by MMB that I could find to instead be triggered by alt-RMB. If they were set originally at ctrl-MMB I changed them to ctrl-alt-RMB, etc. you get the picture.

Modo CFG's only save changes from the built-in default.

Please let me know if it's useful, or if you find other commands that could be changed.

This was made in the WINDOWS version of modo 501. Might work in other versions.

You can open the file in a text editor to see the changes if you like.

modo_sketchup.zip

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, I apologize if it has.

I use fredoscale mostly for it's stretching capability. I notice that after stretching an object (usually multiple times) a bit of unwanted "shearing" happens. This happens to me on ANY project, sketchup 7 and 8, windows and mac. As I say, it usually shows after multiple stretching operations (5+) so I'm not sure if this is a small amount of error that compounds, or something else.

Has anyone else come across it? Anything to be done? I'm used to working around this problem already.

Thanks for your help, I love this plugin so much!

Have to admit I'm a little disappointed. Especially with Layout. They could do so much more with this program. As far as I can tell, they've added "angled dimensions" and "dwg/dxf export". It seems like the biggest advancement is being able to get stuff OUT of Layout and into another program with more functionality. Sigh, somebody please tell me i'm missing something.

Sketchup looks okay: -solid tools, save toolbar locations, view back edges option.

Problem is, people are paying to get Layout and my question right now is, why?

I'm with you Solo. I'd say right now I'm a Sketchyphysics dunce. Not completely illiterate, but definitely spending more time staring at the corner with a cone hat than keeping up with the class. I've gone through the Wiki and if anyone has any great tutorials to share that would certainly rock.

What I really want is for Layout to grow up a little more (or become ruby scriptable).

Ideally I just want a tool to QUICKLY navigate referenced (therefore update-able) high poly SKP files and allow me to do the following in 2d paperspace:

• choose any perspective and/or parallel view and scale easily
• show it in wireframe, dashed hidden line, or textured style
• generate section views with hatching
• associative coloring, hatching and dimensions,
• turn on/off layers per viewport
• multi-leader and regular text boxes
• basic line, rect, arc, circle, freehand tools
• print any size, output pdf, import raster images
• ability to create resizable 2d blocks
• ability to reference multiple SKP's
• customizable shortcuts

Beyond that I find most tools a distraction.

Most of the programs mentioned will do all of this. But since they navigate so slowly it's still faster for me to use a bunch of workarounds in Layout. I put up this post initially simply to be thorough in my quest for increased productivity/decreased hassle.

Thanks for everyone's help and suggestions! I fear I might have upset some people with my opinions on some of the software, please don't take them personally.

Tried Viacad already as I mentioned in the first post. It's SKP importer doesn't work with SU7 at all, and a DWG export from SU opened in Viacad crawls, complete with hideously choppy redraws while rotating. Not worth the cheap price IMHO.

Too bad because it looked so promising.

There was a noticeable improvement on Doublecad as well but I still find Doublecad slower even with OpenGL acceleration. I think it's still Turbocad deluxe for me. Importing materials is a nice bonus as well.
I posed the performance question on the Doublecad forum and William Manning replied saying that they're working on performance improvements though.
Just to be clear: I DID NOT find Doublecad unbearable (glitchy redraws, model hanging for 5 secs on rotate) for navigating high poly models, I just found it slow enough to be frustrating with tight deadlines for drawings.

Autocad does do the trick. Although still not as fast rotating as Sketchup. Unfortunately I can't afford more than the 30 day demo price...
As a side note, out of frustration I tried Turbocad deluxe again (129.95$) and found that I wasn't using OpenGL acceleration. It sped up quite a bit (actually a little better than Autocad). Still not perfect, but hell... neither am I.

Thanks for all your suggestions! Keep em coming. I'm kind of a software slut, i'll try anything once (and then never call it again).

Thanks for the tips. I'll look into those options.

It's very sluggish when the same file in Sketchup has no lag whatsoever. Whether I import it as a file or as an Xref it takes a long time to rotate, zoom or pan. My SKP file sizes can be fairly large though, usually between 15 and 30megs by the time i'm ready to go to 2d. I always use ThomThom's cleanup.rb as well as purge anything unnecessary.

Do you not find it to be slow? Any advice?

I've trolled the Layout discussion forum and everywhere else I could think of to find a companion program for Sketchup to produce good construction drawings.

Currently I tolerate the limitations of Layout, but I'd prefer something like Viacad, Doublecad or Turbocad. Of the 3 Turbocad is my fav but they're all PAINFULLY slow to navigate models with a high poly count.

I'm praying someone has found an alternative drafting program that can navigate a model swiftly and preferably read SKP files.

It's a longshot I know, but I still need to put the question to the experts.

HELP!

Don't forget that I started this thread with this:

@drfabinex said:

It really destroys all the competition for the designing I do. I will concede (grudgingly) that other programs can at times be better suited for other types of design.

Sketchup is not perfect. Hell, it might not even be good at what some professions need, but man it rocks my world everyday. And for the little nitpicky things we can always learn Ruby. (I'm trying right now).

Round 2. Don't mind the terrible stock tile material I tried out on the studio floor.

17 passes (35 mins) with Twilight INTERIOR+ no pp, but a touch of light and contrast might help

no sun. 1 spotlight extremely close (actually in the shot but not rendered), 1 pointlight 10' up and 5' in front of glass.

Had some troubles getting the ice to render edge reflections properly before this pic, the variation was huge depending on where I placed the pointlight above. I tried a darker, textured studio to see if that was the problem with the whiskey reflection from my last attempt and it looks better to me.

Thanks for the tips Gaieus! I'll give it another shot today.

This was my third or fourth try with Twilight.
Picture is a little small and grainy which is a testament to my impatience but I think it looks pretty good. I AM having a problem with the reflection on the top of the whiskey, as you can see, no opacity. I changed the reflection color to match the whiskey. If anybody has any thoughts i'd love to hear them.

The pic is a little blown admittedly. I had all sorts of troubles setting up lights so I tried this render with just the standard sun settings, no lights.
In Sketchup I edited the material of the glass and ice to 15 opacity and and made their color white. I also lightened the whiskey color.
In Twilight I used the Water template for the whiskey and ice and the realistic glass (common) for the glass.
I set the IOR values to the ones given in this thread, (thanks guys, I had no idea you could find those values!)

Rendered for 2h (200 passes i think) on the INTERIOR+ setting.

I appreciate this alot, threads like these are invaluable to this rendering noob

Tried RPS 3d pdf a while ago and it did an alright job.

Currently use SimLab whenever it's necessary and it does a great job. I decided to stick with their old version though because the new "automatic camera mode" didn't seem to be turn-offable in the free version of the new one.

True: scenes aren't designed to control visibility.

but they can.

If they just had the ability to "freeze" I wouldn't have that minor annoyance in my workflow.

The way I prefer to work is simple really:

-Build to my heart's content
-Select all, unselect desired component(s), hide, Add new scene
-Document in Layout
-Build more, add more scenes when necessary

I never need to Unhide because there's always a scene that has everything that I can create a new scene from.

Not trying to step on anybody's toes. Your workflow is just as valid as mine