There's two sets of coordinate systems at play. One is the photomatch - pair of red and green dashed lines, red and green vanishing points, the yellow horizon and the yellow Origin point. The other is the model, or 3D space, with red, green and yellow axes, meeting at their own Zero point.

What I'm having trouble with is aligning these two coordinate systems.
Your suggestion to reset the model axes seemed like it would be helpful, it at least sounded like it could be the solution. However, the option to reset the axes is greyed out; I presume they are then already in their default state.

The discussion if the photo is suitable for the photomatch is irrelevant, since with a different Sketchup template I achieved the result I wanted, seen in the screenshot on the left.
The reason I'm asking how to remedy this problem is to fix my own template and to gain understanding what might have gone wrong in the past that lead to this situation.

I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding.

When I click on the gear icon, it just gives me the regular photomatch editing. I still cannot relocate the zellow square to the zero point in Modelspace.
Am I clicking on the wrong gear icon?

Hello everyone

After a long time I needed to do some light 3D work and I chose SketchUp again for its quite easy to use PhotoMatch feature.

After struggling for a long time I realized that the reason why my model axes and the PhotoMatch axes are not aligning is because the origin and vanishing points do not match anymore. When I used one of the default SU's templates, it all matched and I was able to measure the stuff I needed.

So my question is this - how can I move the PM origin point back to 0 in the model?

Adding screenshots for reference, both of the wrong and the correct result.

Hi,

So I've recently circled back to using SU and V-Ray for a sideproject of mine. It is an interior refurbishment project and I wanted to explore the material options of a wardrobe assembly.

What I wanted to do in V-Ray is apply a texture to the assembly. I largely succeeded, by using the Texture Blend material, with Texture A having the original color and Texture B the bitmap with alpha channel, setting Blend Amount to 1 and ticking the Composite box.

However, if I wanted to see what it looks like at half the size (keeping the aspect ratio of the texture), I would get the image twice (four times in fact) on the whole doors. That's when I tried to untick the option "Tile" in the bitmap settings under the Placement tab.

This however makes the texture completely disappear from the whole stack. I tried modifying the texture position in SU, in hopes of "finding" the decal, to no avail. Resizing the texture in SU also didn't bring any results.
Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for any ideas.

Hi guys,

Thanks for the replies.

@TIG, SketchupIvy is exactly what I'm using to generate branches right now. The trouble is, I would like to generate loads of them (and ideally make them follow the underlying geometry of the cables). This is my current procedure:

As you can see, this is only one branch, which, when growing vertically, gives a good result. But even if this branch turned out well, do I have to try my luck getting a good RNG per each plant? What if I had diagonal leading cables? What if they were on a curved surface (like for example here)? I guess I would love to be able to tell the branches "stay within Distance from these Curves when growing."

@Pilou, the component replacer is an interesting suggestion, although that turns the whole thing into a panelling problem, see:

...where black is the steel cable geometry, blue are the branches and red are the component boundaries. Probably not a general solution, but it could work in this simple case.

Hello all,

I am trying to grow ivy / vines for a garden for an archviz project. My goal is to produce a result similar to what can be seen here or here.

Generating leaves is easy thanks to Skatter. I am looking for a way to speed up generating the guiding geometry (ie. branches) that grow along the cables.

So far I can use the Ivy Generator extension combined with Skatter, the result being such:

...which, to be honest, is not too bad, but not great either. I have to click manually for every branch/plant to grow, which can be time consuming. Also I think the directionality of the growth would be problematic.

Hence my question - is there I way I could automate generating the guiding geometry (branches) on a surface? Or do you have any tips on how to speed this process up? Thanks a lot.

bump does a similar plugin exist already? or am i just bad at googling?

in this case, there IS a correct FOV to be had, and it's the angle between the two lines defined in the brief. I was looking for a way to get it correctly from the geometry, not having to measure and type in the angle.

@hieru said:

You can do it using faces. Select a face then Right Click > Align View.

Thanks, that helps in some way, although I'm not sure I understand completely.

Align View aligns with the normal vector of the face, ie I could get the viewing direction after ensuring the lines are of equal length, but I still would need a tool or a way to set the FOV itself (i don't want to guess it using the zoom tool).

EDIT: ok, it kinda works, I think I'm fine with guessing the FOV for now. The way used this was that I created a face perpendicular to the viewing direction, set the camera with Align View, position the camera and then eyeball the field of view so that the face's edges are aligned with my screen.

Hi,

Is there any way to set the camera FOV and its direction along geometric lines defined in the model? In an architectural competition, we have currently the camera view defined with only two lines. To set the camera position I am using the Position Camera tool, which is easy, but I still have to guess and eyeball the field of view. I would like to do this with a few clicks (define left/right edge or something similar)

thanks for any suggestions

OK, you're right, I didn't want to hear that, but if that's the only way, then I have no choice
I was just hoping it would have been simple to write a converter for the old materials, but that's just because I don't know much about the structure of the files.

Thanks for the answer.

Hi everyone,

Question first - is there a way to quickly convert VRay 1 materials to VRay 2? Or 3?

This will probably be a blast from the past for the majority of you here, but you are my only hope, since apparently i can't search for things on the internet properly

A friend of mine has a setup that consists of SketchUp 8 and the old VRay 1.49. We are trying to convince her to upgrade to SU 2015 & VRay 2, but came across a curious problem - an interior render that took ~10 minutes in the older versions takes 100 minutes in the new one.

After a while I figured out that it is because of the materials that it's taking this long - when i recreated one material with the VRayBRDF layer the rendertime went down from 4 minutes to only 1, not much longer than a scene without any materials.

Before:

After:

So, my question is, is there a tool (or a simple, quick way) to convert the old materials to the newer version?

@ryouga182 said:

I am having the same problem with my nvidia gtx1060, it has the latest drivers in 6/6/2017... I am not that clever instaling drivers, I would like to ask you what drivers did yyou install to solve the problem and where I could find them. Thank you!

Edit
I use a MSi laptop GS73VR 6RF with nvidia gtx1060 and sketchup pro 2017
I unninstaled the nvidia drivers, restart and installed the 369.02 version from msi site. I also forced sketchup to run with nvidia and tryed all the energy sets on the nvidia panel but nothing changes on the performance, I get a 6% average of GPU load.
My models are around 50 and 120Mb and all get the same reduced fps.

Any help will be greatly apreciated!!

hi ryouga182,

what i did was i simply downloaded the latest nvidia driver from the MSI's support page - this is the one for my machine, you may need to search for your exact model. Then a simple uninstallation of the current drivers & a new installation of these downloaded ones made the trick.

You can try using the Display Driver Uninstaller tool (DDU - http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html) to try to get a clean uninstall of the drivers.

In your Device Manager you can also try and check which driver version is actually being used - Windows 10 is sometimes very crafty and needs to be checked

other than that i have no idea.

@sketch3d.de said:

don't use the native nVidia driver but always do prefer an available (regularly customized) graphics driver of the notebook maker instead.

do a clean install:

• uninstall recent GeForce driver
• restart Windows
• install the previously downloaded driver (see above)

Thank you for your response. I completely forgot that sometimes a 'downgrade' may be helpful and manufacturer-customized drivers may make sense.

The performance is now completely satisfactory (ie. smooth) while using the dedicated GPU. Although in the nVidia control panel I had to set 'Use nVidia processor' manually, since it would default to the integrated graphics card.

My problems are now solved; thank you all again

@kaas said:

@eidam655 said:

@kaas, what CPU do you have? do you switch dynamically between the integrated & dedicated GPUs?

I have a i5-3570 and the embedded gpu of that chip is disabled in the bios. I'm always running on the gtx1060.

I don't have that option in my laptops's BIOS. Could you please try enabling the integrated graphics card and see what happens?

@numerobis, yes, i already checked that when I was responding to Dave R; no effect whatsoever.

It's not a problem with the scene either; I opened it (in both SU 2015 and 2017) on my desktop with a GTX660Ti and I got almost perfectly smooth orbiting (with 2017 being even faster).

@numerobis said:

Did you already try reinstalling the driver? (clean install)

yes, numerobis, I tried reinstalling both SketchUps (2015 and 2017) and performed a clean install of the latest nvidia drivers (376.09)

@kaas, what CPU do you have? do you switch dynamically between the integrated & dedicated GPUs?

@Dave R, yes, that's where I set the frequency - to no avail.

Okay, I found out what's happening - the GPU stays at all the lowest frequencies (core 140MHz, memory 200MHz).

Does anyone any suggestion how to bump it up?

Edit: Same thing happens also with the very last release of SU 2017. The frequency just stays the same.

Edit 2: I found out how to force the driver to use the maximum frequency for the chip (1.4GHz). However, this did not help - turns out, Sketchup sends no instructions to the graphics card - the GPU Load stays at 0%. However, while running it on thr Intel graphics, it receives 50 - 100% GPU load while orbiting. I could really use some hints guys

hi all,

i recently bought a brand new laptop with a GTX1060 GPU (MSI GS63VR) and I would like to ask about your experience with this card's performance.

I opened up a 130MB model of a football stadium done for work a year ago, and I was met with very subpar performance, ie. roughly 1-2 FPS while orbiting. Next up I disabled Hardware Acceleration and the performance improved (!) to somewhere around 10 FPS. And at last, for the hell of it, I tried running sketchup on the integrated GPU (Intel HD Graphics 530) - the performance jumped to almost smooth 18-20 FPS.

Now, I am still using SketchUp 2015 and I guess I should try the newest one.

Does anyone have different experience running GTX 1060 with sketchup? desktop versions? different sketchup versions? I'd like to hear your thoughts.

the model looks like this (lots of geometry, few textures)