Your scene is dark, because sunlight doesn't seem to be coming through from your window. Check Solar North plugin and position your sun direction properly (And tweak your daytime inside SU). Also make sure that window itself or glass material doesn't block sunlight (Hide windows and test render).

Brute Force is slower but more accurate. Irradience Map + Light Cache combination is best in most case (a lot faster and result doesn't change much). I don't know why this give you bug splat, i suggest asking in both official forums of SketchUp and ChaosGroup (Vray) to get a proper response.

Your Light Cache sample size looks unnecessarily low, change it to 0.03 (maybe this fix your crash). See this official manual for more info: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAYSKETCHUP/Light+Cache+Settings (See left section for other settings or search)

Also your Noise Limit under Raytrace looks too low, change it to 0.05 . Let Denoiser handle noise problems, it's a lot faster!

@macker said:

I was using multiples of 1024. What an odd issue to have.

[Edit] HAH! The issue comes back if you use styles. Brilliant. Surely trimble must issue a fix for this?

Well, if you change styles, then this pattern works: 1024, 2048, 4086...
I have no idea but it works like this!

Edit: False alarm! I had tried that in a rush and it doesn't really seem to work with styles

@pixero said:

How does the geometry look when imported back into SketchUp?
Is it grouped the same?
Are the components intact?
Is the geometry triangulated or as it was originally in SU?

Seems it imports one component that contains the whole geometry and everything inside exploded. Also triple clicking only select ones that shares the same material. See below for gif demonstrations.

Triangulation and other export features are optional (see attachment). (But making "preserve_instancing => true" doesn't seem to be working)

Settings highly depends on the scene. If you can share your result with setting screenshots, we can help and give some advice.

Well, if you go to forum thread of that plugin, there Rami says:

@rami_lpm said:

Warning
This plugin is not working correctly in sketchup 2017. As a workaround, you can set resolution to 1020,2040 or 4080

So set your resolution multiplied by 2. There is no limit to this which means you can set it 8160, 16320 etc...

@filibis said:

I will see tomorrow what causes problem in the office computer

I tried again in the office today, i noticed this code was missing in slender.bat

%~dp0\slender.blend

(see attachment) I don't remember deleting it, maybe downloaded the .zip yesterday before you update or something idk
So i downloaded .zip again today, it worked fine.

You can try Window > Model Info > Statistics > Purge Unused
and check this plugin out: CleanUp³

Hmm, i see now better.
So, can we say it's not that suitable for interior stuff? Or is it possible to add other light types in addition to sun into baking process?

Well, i got home and i tried on my laptop, it worked like a charm!
I will see tomorrow what causes problem in the office computer (only difference is that's Windows 7 64-bit).

Then i created my own scene, it worked pretty well too.
Except when i tried to experiment with some interior scenes. See attachment for faulty result. It's completely dark inside (with some light artifacts).

baked_result_comparison_v2013.skp

@qpik said:

Have you unpacked the whole 'slender' folder from the zip file?
Do you have blender installed? Maybe the installation path is different than mine (C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender.exe), check slender.bat in the 'slender' folder.
In sketchup open Ruby Console and type

load 'C;/../..slender/slender.rb'

with the actual path.

Yes, unpacked, have Blender (2.78c) on default location.
But i found out that .dae and .log files are in my default plugin location (...\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2017\SketchUp\Plugins). So appearently my problem was copying 'slender.rb' file to that location in order to make the command (load 'slender.rb') work.

Now i tried your new code line with my path and it did some CMD stuff and received 'true' result on Ruby Console. But seems there is no imported result in SU. I tried importing that 'overwritten' .dae file but they seem identical. What should i expect at this point? Is it going to import baked result to side of the original model (as you show in first post)?

Hi qpik, this will definetely be a useful plugin and worth developing i believe.

Couple of things to note; i didn't know how to load a plugin via SU Console (assuming you meant Ruby Console?) and i found out i needed to type this with inverted commas: Load 'slender.rb'
You may consider to add info considering newbies to plugin world like me even at this stage to be able to test.

@qpik said:

@jql said:

So tell me one thing. Slender exports to blender does it all by itself and imports it back baked?

Exactly.

That just didn't work for me.
I opened your file and run the plugin via Ruby console and received the 'true' result but there is no COLLADA (.dae) file in the folder (there are textures exported though). And seems nothing happened.
Am i doing something wrong? If you could demonstrate with .gif or video, that would be great.

@intelcoreduo said:

I've downloaded free high-res 0,25m accurate terrain data for Bergen, Norway (or anywhere else)

May i ask from where did you get/download that free high-res data? I can't seem to find anything higher then ~30m accuracy.

@intelcoreduo said:

but SketchUp will crash during the import, even when the file is tiny (small area, and .dem file is just a few kb)

I don't know why it crashes but if you could share the .dem , i can have a look.

@karllarsen said:

Added a VRAY infinite plane - applied VRAY grass to the infinite plane -- the infinite plane is unusually rectangular (like 1:4) and the grass is stretched and looks obviously wrong through the hole in the box in the render.

Infinite plane is -as the name implies- infinite. The rectangular shape you see is just a representative shape.

@karllarsen said:

Started from scratch - created box, cut a hole in the side, added a portal light - changed the intensity from 30, to 5000 to 0, no effect on the interior, whatsoever.

You are doing wrong with portal lights. Quoting from the manual that i give below:
"Portal light – Light intensity is determined by the environment behind the light. The Color and Multiplier parameters are ignored."
So basically you'll need a sun and adjust its parameters if necessary.

I highly recommend checking this official manual: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAYSKETCHUP (You can use search bar on the left)
There are detailed information for almost everything with examples (such as for Vray Material: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAYSKETCHUP/VRay+Material+%7C+VRayBRDF).

And here is an interior lighting tutorial with portal lights: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAYSKETCHUP/V-Ray+for+SketchUp+QuickStart+-+Interior+Lighting

well, yea it seems there is something wrong but if you know & trust the site you can continue by clicking details > visit the site

no, that link you gave redirects me to this: http://meurthe.crai.archi.fr/wordpressFr/

Try this instead?: http://www.crai.archi.fr/rld/

If you could describe why you think the ceiling is 'wrong', that would be better.
For me it looks like you have an omni light on top of table and that causes an unrealistic lit in the middle of the ceiling. If that's the case, try removing it or tweaking its settings.

Why on earth noone attempted to create such feature before?
Anyways it's great to see this plugin taking shape.

I suggest using "Soft-body" phrase in the name since it's kind of a universal term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft-body_dynamics

"Soft-body Simulator" maybe?
"**SoftWorks"**and "ClothWorks" are quite reasonable though.

@kaas said:

@Filibis Thanks for the link! I saw the announcement but missed the webinar itself. Will be an interesting view!

No problem! I missed as well but good to see they share it quickly. Also i think this will be a series of webinars on this topic which is great.

Hi everyone,
Today there was a webinar about Architectural Visualisation inside Unreal Engine and its capabilities. I hope SketchUp to Unreal Engine workflow will get easier & faster in the near future.
Here is video of the webinar for those interested.

Just wow! This is some top level stuff without a doubt. I liked the before/after on your website as well.