Hi.

I wanted to apologise for my past trolling agains the Mac platform. Yesterday, I finally gave in and purchased a used 2011 Mac Mini w/ 4GB RAM, Dual core i5 and discrete Radeon graphics, mainly to be used as an iTunes server for movies and music, since I'm replacing the old DVD players with Apple TVs.

I'm enjoying learning new ways of doing things and I'm trying to keep an open mind about it. It's like learning a new language. Already upgraded it to Mavericks.

Having a computer with very low power consumption opens up a few possibilities, as you can keep it on 24/7. I have a few ideas that would be cool if possible, so if anyone could point me to options to achieve them, I'll be grateful. I've been only 24 hours with it, so please excuse my n00biness. Things obvious to you are new to me. I'm also perusing the "useful mac apps" thread.

-Act as a Security DVR.
It would be cool if there was an app that automatically recorded activity from a webcam, and sent you emails and/or could connect with an iPhone app to see live video.

-Act as a Slingbox.
My brother lives in Chile and he misses Ecuadorian TV, so maybe I can find a USB TV tuner (be it NTSC or ISDB-T International) that can be accessed across the internet via an app or something.

-Share a printer, maybe even with iOS devices.

-We have an iPod Touch, an iPad and two Apple TVs sharing a 11Mbps connection Do you think we could see some benefit from the "app caching" option in OSX Server? Anyone uses it?

Any other ideas? What do you guys do with your old Mac Minis? I'm pretty sure you have some interesting projects going...

BTW, I use wireless logitech keyboard and mouse with my PC. They both use a single "unifying receiver". It would be cool if there was a way to use them with the Mini and switch between the PC and the Mini with a button press. So far I'm using the Mini with a wired Apple Keyboard and a generic USB mouse.

Hi, everyone. I've just changed my old mouse for a Logitech T400, which has a touch zone instead of a scroll wheel. With the old scroll wheel, zooming was jumpy but predictable. However, with the touch zone it is now both jumpy and not very predictable.

Anyone has any experience with touch mice and SU's zooming?

I'm seriously considering getting a Mac to be able to use Mac-only software... And no longer having to confess ignorance in front of my Mac-using clients who ask me to put my USB drive and play the videos in their Macs.

Have you seen Mavericks? Do you like it?

Long time no gallery post!

I've just compiled some animations made during 2011-2013. I remember the first time some people here didn't like the music, so this time I picked up a "movie trailer" style music track. Just a minute and a half.

Weird as it may sound, all I get is a "the page you requested was not found." Geo restrictions, maybe?

This is all I get when I follow the link:

Strange indeed.

Anyway, I solved the bugsplat problem by switching to SU2013, and now I have my model in SU. Thanks everyone!

Thank you everyone. Autodesk seems to have killed the converter as I can't find it on that page.

So I installed the MAX trial, optimized the model, and exported as .3ds. It came complete, but all messed up. So I decided to purchase Simlab's plugin and try the FBX route. This is what happened...

Again and again when trying to open SU8 after the install. I guess I'll have to uninstall it just to be able to open SU again.

Thank you. I saw that, but didn't like the "machine locked license" part and the double-priced floating license option.

Still, if it's good, I'll buy it. Anyone has any experience with it? Can't seem to find any reviews.

I've just received a model in both FBX and MAX formats. Anyone has any experience with converting these to something readable by SketchUp?

Just wanted to say than you for all the great scripts you have developed, especially the Random Painter (my request).

Best wishes in your new job!

I see Lumen RT Review was covered. Anybody has any news about Lumen RT Advanced?

Csaba, I use English versions in both SU7 and SU8. My keyboard mapping has always been Spanish. Already tried a system restore back to december 26th (oldest restore point available), but the gremlin is still present. In fact, I have just witnessed how it changed from dot to comma within a minute, while working! .DAE export is also still defective.

Again this is only happening in SketchUp (which is now back to the non-trimble version after the system restore). And it only started happening this week. Weird.

I'll run the virus scan and if it finds nothing, I'll have to re-install Windows 7.

Hi, everyone. Long time no post.

I'm having a problem: My decimal symbol within SU keeps changing by itself, even during the same SketchUp session, without closing it. Other programs, such as Draftsight and Inkscape, are unaffected. Sometimes it's a dot, sometimes it's a comma. This affects both SU and SU8. And this problem seems related to another with Collada export. Models exported in Collada become seriously oversized and distorted in Lumion. I'm also posting the same problem in the Lumion forum, but it seems to be on the SU side of things.
http://lumion3d.com/forum/importing/mysterious-problem-when-importing-collada-files-from-sketchup/msg47891/#msg47891

This happened this week. Before, everything was normal. The only software I remember installing in the last few days was Synthesia, and the rest have been just routine Windows 7 updates.

UPDATE: Solved by reinstalling Windows.

@conks01 said:

Hi,
I'm completely new to SU and have started to use it this week.

Focus on modeling techniques and texturing. If your model is good enough and well-textured, it doesn't really matter what you use to render it. It will always look good.

Nice! I believe iRay is the only GPU raytracer to require workstation-type GPUs. The rest work best with gaming-type ones.

This is going to be a long week, waiting for Pete's revelations.

A side-by-side of my results. To recap:

Thea: 3-year old Core i5 750
Bloom Unit: Amazon Cloud
Octane: 1 1/2 year old NVIDIA GTX 570

Observations:
All three are noisy. However, Octane and Bloom Unit seem to have the most "treatable" noise, with Octane having an advantage in supersampling/antialiasing (notice the louvers). Unfortunately, Octane is also the most difficult to use from SketchUp, IMHO. (Users of more integrated versions of Octane totally love it, however). Notice how the vegetation ignored the alpha channel, for example.

Sure, here it is:

BTW, since Bloom Unit runs on iRay over CUDA, I decided to dust off Octane Render (have a license but haven't used it since last year), which is also CUDA-based. Here's my 2-minute test. I was successful on my third attempt to export from SketchUp, since the first two times the exporter crashed SU.

Export time: 3 min. 5 sec.
Render time: Same as the other two tests, 2 minutes.
Hardware: NVIDIA GTX 570 w/1.25GB mem
Settings: Pathtracing. The only change from the raw export was that I made the glass a portal since I could not figure out how to make proper glass in Octane.

I'd love if someone could compare Blender Cycles vs. Octane vs. Bloom Unit. Battle of the GPU renderers! Unfortunately I'm a zero in Blender.

Sure, here you have a screen capture. It says the upload rate is 25.07 kB/s.

I had to kill the upload process manually after closing SketchUp... It kept open.

My connection with Miami, FL, for reference.

So here's my quick test.

Upload speed test:
Filesize: Almost 20MB.

My location: Ecuador.

Time to upload to BloomUnit server, in the US: 19 min, according to BloomUnit's clock, which counted this time against my total time of usage.

Time to upload the same file to MailBigFile, in the UK: 2min 2secs, measured with a stopwatch.

Render test:
Both were left to cook for 2 minutes @1280x720. The Bloom Unit image is framed different because the SU window resized after starting BloomUnit.

Bloom Unit
Settings: Default
Hardware: Amazon Cloud. I imagine it must be iRay running on a rack of GPUs.

Thea Render
Settings: TR1. File exported from Twilight Render after deleting all TWL materials except the glass. Doubled exposure during rendertime to better match the light levels in Bloom Unit image.
Hardware: 3-year old Core i5 750. CPU-only.

Additional information: I'm not a Thea expert. This is the first time I open it in months.