Hi Vodka,
are you still with us here ? How's Modo ?
Your plugin works great even with v2 and plugin 2.4 of Maxwell.
Actually it works better than expected since I no longer autoMXM and export using your plugin. SU materials are imported into Studio with their original SU names but with the MXM settings as assigned. Even the default material is not exported when using your plugin. All very handy.

One fashion request, could you make the plugin panel a lot smaller ?
SU panels and text's are a little less big. Although I use a 30" screen your panel takes a good chunck of it....
Tx again
Francois

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=23534&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=15

I think there are enough SU-OSX render-users who wish for a more "pro" material panel.

Francois

Maybe you could explain what a feature request really means ? Is it realistic to expect an improved material panel in the next 6 months for us pro-OSX users ?

Francois

Ha, its good to see the team at Google does pick up sarcasm and humor and even responds to it. No need to worry then..

you have to understand though that some of us work 8 hours a day with SU in a hectic architectural office. Workflow ergonomics are simply very bad with the current material pallete for OSX users and utterly frustrating.

On OSX the material panel is by itself actually not at all free of bugs, materials dissapear from time to time to reappear again after purging unused, materials duplicate by themselves when assigning geometry, did I mention slow responsiveness, no order or changing order in the way materials show up in the panel.

It would be nice to keep us updated when the team has any success to get the material panel a bit more userfriendly. In the meantime I will be using MXMreporter. Since I export to Maxwell mostly this little ruby works surprisingly well as a subsitute to SU's material panel.
Francois
I haven't had the time to test the speedtip. But will of course. Tx.

Mark me down as well, for as many users as you can. I am sure most users have grown used to the clumsyness of the panel but for those who use SU daily for their work this one would be a major update, I would even call it SU 8. Thats how important it is for those who render. And there are a lot of users now who do...

Hi,
I am on OSX, using a Mac.
As many know the material panel under OSX does not have the option to see a list of textures with their names. SInce I work with lots of materials and large models its rather difficult to see or assign the right material. Often there are various shades of white and grey hard to distinguish.

The only way to do this on a Mac is to hoover over the colored/textured squares and wait for the names to show up. This is a slow process since the material does not show the names instantly. You have to keep hold of your mouse at each material and wait for the name. Now imagine that over dozens of materials each and every time you assign a texture.

Google should have solved this issue long ago but I have given up. Maybe someone can make a plug-in that shows the material list as used in the model with their names in a column. It would be great if the tools for assigning like the paint bucket would pick up from the names as well. It would also be great if you could click on geometry to highlight the material in the list.

Maybe someone else can explain this better but I need a material panel in some sort that works with the material names.
Any help is very appreciated and as I assume not only by me. Especially considering all those that render with third party app's and need a more sophisticated way to distinguish the materials other than having to guess by the images in panel.
Francois

This thread is being answered and discussed here as well, without a final solution though.. This is really Google's job to fix
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=23741&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

I will post a link to the bug section as well to this thread.

I have looked at MXMreporter again and it does actually almost gets the job done. For exporting to Maxwell you really need this rb. With MXM reporter Maxwel v2 works rather well.

A great ruby as MXMreporter is it would need a little fashion makeover to work well with SU for most users. The window is too big and could be slimmed down in a more SU style.

Hi,
I have had some more time to test and I am pleased to see MXM reporter works well even without autoMXM on at export in v2. So the export is fast and I do not have to copy paste material names in the SU material panel.

I just asign materials through MXM reporter and the mxs file show up in Studio with SU names for the materials with the settings as they are in the original MXM's.
Just perfect.

Is thee any way to get into contact with the people who nowadays "maintain" Google Sketchup. I don't think much development is still going on but I assume there are still a few guys sort of keeping Sketchup going for OS's pdates . If I knew how to reach the Google Sketchup maintance guy or girl I would let her or him texture my models for a week under OSX.

I thought a sorted list with names was already in SU on PC's ?

Anyhow, Your plugins are great as I use them already, hope you can sort it out for us all
TX in advance

Francois

Jeff, you are exactly right.
Also Thomthom you are right as well. As long as this issue is not solved by Google a plugin with some kind of functionality as the material panel has but then with named materials would be great.

Google will not address this issue since I have been asking them for years now. Google addresses issues for beginners, not for the advanced users.

I am waiting for some Chinese or American of whatver group of people who are looking at Google's work lately and come up with the idea to develop SketchCAD. A crossover from Sketchup to Revit. A kind of Sketchup with tools for for the busy modeller in architecture. @LAst had a vision were modelling would be done in such a way that you can actually see what is happening real time. In Vectorworks and Revit and I assume in most other modelers you are still in wireframe mode and have to update a perspective view to see a little of what is going on. You do not have to be Steve Jobs to see the market for SketchCAD.

Hi Jeff,
tx for your info on the colorpicker. It seems a solution is near.

I also saw this that might help to solve this problem.
http://www.tangerine.net.au/

With interactive colorpicker I just meant that you have to be able to use the list for asigning materials.

Actually I am not very interested in color or texture images in the rb or plugin or even colorpicker. Just the names and the use of them in the workflow of asigning and checking assigments of materials. I don't need images with the materials as I do not need them for layers either. I want to see white 01 and white 02 for example. If you can see images of the materials all the better of course but I have no need for it, neither have others I think when modeling.

ok, if you can do that. I will test in on my OSX system.
Its important that that the list is interactive with the geometry. I need to assign materials to geometry and see what materials are assigned. For back and frontfaces.

I am not sure if its possible but I would like to group materials ( and layers but that is another story). I find the long lists not very handy. It would be nice if I could group and fold a list of for instance Formfonts materials.

Tx in advance Thomthom

Francois

Hi, a guy who wrote a plugin for to get a list view to export to Maxwell got a long way:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=19850

But it did not fully work for me on OSX since I could not really use this list to assign materials to geometry. Also his panel did not work like SU panels and I had to keep making it visable. He was not on a Mac and had to improvise a lot with my testing.

If anyone is willing to make a proper rb, I am willing to test endlessly to get it to work on my Macpro 8 core.

Google is doing 3D earth, I don't think waiting for them is any good.
I am really surprised SU is not already been copied and improved by a new company. Imagine we can now render unbiased with real light at incredible speed, uv mapping and all but we have no proper way to assign some simple materials to our geometry. I think this ruby would make the OSX community as happy as can be.
Francois

Hi,
I am on OSX, using a Mac.
As many know the material panel under OSX does not have the option to see a list of textures with their names. SInce I work with lots of materials and large models its rather difficult to see or assign the right material. Often there are various shades of white and grey hard to distinguish.

The only way to do this on a Mac is to hoover over the colored/textured squares and wait for the names to show up. This is a slow process since the material does not show the names instantly. You have to keep hold of your mouse at each material and wait for the name. Now imagine that over dozens of materials each and every time you assign a texture.

Google should have solved this issue long ago but I have given up. Maybe someone can make a plug-in that shows the material list as used in the model with their names in a column. It would be great if the tools for assigning like the paint bucket would pick up from the names as well. It would also be great if you could click on geometry to highlight the material in the list.

Maybe someone else can explain this better but I need a material panel in some sort that works with the material names.
Any help is very appreciated and as I assume not only by me. Especially considering all those that render with third party app's and need a more sophisticated way to distinguish the materials other than having to guess by the images in panel.
Francois

Do people who come to these forums a lot also frequent the Sketchup Google.com help forums ?

I never did really and just had a look there. It seems all the action is over here. Isn't it funny that Google the biggest thing on earth is actually not half as good as the Sketchucation site. Isn't it also funny to see @Last was a lot more capable than Google. Its seems size does not mean much at all.

Mark, Maxwell v2 is very clean these days for direct light (exterior) renderings. These are all SL 15 done in about 10 hours overnight (8core Macpro 3Gh 4Gb ram). Then using AGS glass for the most part speeded up rendering as well. In all other glass surfaces I used AGS.
There was no grain really in the final images. Interiors are different though because of the indirect light that slows donw rendering at least a few times.
I got the glass edges trick from another architect on the Maxwell forum. He also advised me to fact the glass. I did that with the round edges ruby for SU and facetted with 1edge.

Richard, saw a kirchen of you somewere that was impressive too.
About the print on the glass, this architect did this before on another building, a small museaum with an even less subtle print.
http://homepage.mac.com/fillieverhoeven/broekerveiling/large-2.html
I modelled that building years ago as well in Sketchup, click image 01 en 02 for my SU images:
-http://www.architektenkombinatie.nl/index.php?id=12&user_reference_pi1[project]=55

Tx for the Tomtoms paint tip, will try that. I have not seen any problems with 6 components yet in 7. But I am always in a rush and end up remoddeling a lot instead of using older models....

Anyhow, its great with Maxwell you tend to discuss the architecture in detail instead of the drawing itself. Maxwell is improving but we are waiting for Vray to come to SU-OSX. We feel we need more trees and plants and those are hardly available for Maxwell. we will probably be using a combination of renderers for a while. We also get good results out of Modo with SU models/

The print is a van Gogh painting. Its for an office for a bank. I think the print relates to art as being the best investment.
But actually the print itself is not yet decided on. I have just made these images, not the design btw.

One problem I had in SU 7.1 is that the backface of the glass panels often changed and was difficult to control in SU. Sometimes it was really hard to get the backface assigned to the default material and often unwanted material duplicates showed up while modeling and texturing in SU.

The tree reflections in the glass were done by simple 2D clipmaps of trees in SU exported as such into Studio.

Looking at the Vray work on this site I hope to see the Mac version soon. I have a feeling Vray might be more cost effective in terms of renderspeed and ease of modeling and texturing.

Francois

Hi,
I just finished a small project to visualize a print on a glass facade.
The print is a white pattern on th outside of glass panels in an open ventilated system. A bit of a fashion these days in Holland.
Here is a link to the images:
http://homepage.mac.com/fillieverhoeven/mxm-glass/index.html

I wanted to visulize this for a client on a new building. Since this kind of thing is better looked at in detail I also made some perspectives in close up.

I modelled the glass and the print is modelled in a seperate surface 0.1 mm from the glass panels. The print is a clipmap. The glass itself is AGS where for the same panels the edges are facetted in "real glass" (low grade with a touch of roughness).
I had to do it like this I think to make the print give shades on the wall behind it. Real glass does not work well in Maxwell because it has difficulties shading.

Rendering in v2 in Maxwell is a lot better than it was. I still like Maxwell for its supereal light. I made these images using lens shift, hdr background (not for illuminating).

Image 1 and 2 are directly out of SU/Maxwell without any postpocessing,
Francois
image 3 has some trees and sky done in Photoshop.

SU is a fantastic modeler for architecture. But for Zaha Hadid not of course and not for a architectural firm doing 3D production work for the actual building process. Also not for those who want to do any photorealistic rendering using cars and trees available for rendering in 3DS etc. The only good reason to use SU is for its intuitive and easy modeling of not to complex architectural designs, not to forget those should not be too detailed or large in polygons.

If you are in the industry of architectural design you are constantly looking around to see if things move on to the next step. Thanks to Modo we have seen more of the future then SU could ever bring us, Vectorworks also has a very easy modeler and I think Revit stands a good change because of its integration of BIM. Again SU does nothing there.

SU is maintained by Google, not developed or going to be further developed. Layout is ridiculously slow and a good reason to doubt Googles efforts in the area of CAD. But Sketchup is for now a great little app for its simplicity and elegant UI, something most other apps should take a good look at. Its also abvious that we will not be doing sketchy lines for ever when in todays world Chinese firms offer photorealism for a few hundred euros or even less.