The material editor is one of those reasons to look for a better modeler than Sketchup. The material editor stands for massive loss of time clicking and waiting. On a Mac when you you have 5 shades of gray you have to click them all to find the right one.

The materialpanel needs groups to organize materials, a rewrite to make it faster and a list view for Macs. These are just the basics.

I often wonder how its possible the frustrations with the panel do not leed to a revolt against Google. It probably just shows the majority of SU users never really does much with SU.

Francois

Some recent additions to our gallery,
everything modeled with Sketchup, rendered with Maxwell.
With Maxwel most recent plugin rendering has become a much more pleasent experience.

http://homepage.mac.com/fillieverhoeven/ABHW/index.html

Francois

Just made this design, all in done in SU and rendered straight out of SU with the new plugin for Maxwell.
http://web.me.com/fillieverhoeven/architektuur/table.html

Francois

What kind of images do you think you should be able to do half a year from now ?

Francois

You almost feel the need to whisper...... great comment.

The top one is more dramatic and classical while the bottom one is more modern and a little more open. The drama in the top one is achieved by the small opening to next space and the heavy straight beams ensuring valueable stuff beneath them is well protected. The high ceilings in both images do 90% of the desired look and feel of the space. I think you can just make a white box in SU with a floorplan 12 x 12 m and make it 15 m high and you have a museum in notime. I have seen some of SANAA's work doing just that.

But to be clear, this is our own little digital museum, no clients that we know of is considering to give us the resources to actually build it. And so, we can all rest assured the sun can't do any harm to our Modo sculptures and paintings..

Richard, tx for the animation advise. I am doing an office interior animation all done in SU. I export an image sequence at 1024x768 and use Quicktime pro to assemble these images into a Quicktime movie at 30fps for about 3 to 5 minutes. I still find it hard to make the whole movie fluent. I use a camera at 21mm focal distance. Shadows off and with the sun for shading I adjust the lighting to make sure faces are not too dark.
Francois

Hi Richard, I knew you would check things here too.. Just a matter of time.. tx for stopping by.

The flooding of light is typical for us Dutch, we rarely have that and so this museum takes advantage of such conditions even though the work exhibited will be ruined ...

You are right about the camera position, too far back and since this is SU we can just alter the size of the space and stay were we are..

Isn't the new Maxwell plugin a great prize for those that have stayed with Maxwell from the beginning.
And do you know a nice app to make a simple but rendered animation of a SU model.

Francois

The washed gray is what I meant to do but the weird grain is done by reducing the filesize in Aperture.
There is more of our work to see here, all iluustration done with Sketchup, Modo and Maxwell.
http://www.fillieverhoeven.nl

What I like very much in about Maxwell is that it renders SU's 2 point perspective. In the plugin I used a white hdri (skydome) and the sun and two light emitters and a clouded sky background. I added a light roughness to the glass in the roof to make the shadows even softer. Maxwell does a gret job in getting the light well balanced without much effort. The new plugin for Sketchup to Maxwell is amazingly well made and makes rendering Sketchup models for design purposes extra fun.
Francois

Tx,
I visited your blog, nice work and also very nice links to other blogs.

I see you are rather happy with SU 8. I haven't updated yet but wondered if there are any speedimprovements. I am actually doing an animation and wondered if it had any use to get the update.
Francois

Hi, we made a few studies using Modo and wanted a museum around it as well. We thought Sketchup would do nicely to model the museum and render it with the Modo models exhibited. We used the new Maxwellrender plugin which made it possible to make these images straight out of Sketchup.

Francois
Due to the resizing I see there some artifacts in the second picture. I posted these just for the lighting and space and so left it like this.

tx Pixero,
I am sure all 3D modeling applications will work like this sooner or later. SU probably later or maybe too late. I just had a discussion on the Vectorworks board were I wondered if it was possible to model in a semi rendered mode or/and perspective view. It turned out it was not possible to do that really well.
Many there answered that orthogonal modeling in wireframe was the ultimate way to work. That also seemes to be the programmers idea of Vectorworks. To me it just shows how old generations of software somtimes fade away rather quick.

Francois

I just read that Sketchup is still bigger than Revit, right behind 3ds Max.
http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/Reviews/Review070_1.asp

Looking at these numbers I understand the disappointment about were Sketchip is going according to Google's stated strategy. Obviously a large portion of SU's userbase would love to stay on board a winning ship. One wonders truly how a more dedicated CAD company would have handled such succes in the business. A good chance SU would become the industry standard in architectural modeling. Many feel here that SU needs another, younger and more enthousiastic captain more like the original one to command the current SU team.

But at the moment SU is still a great tool and SU8 is even better. But looking at SU8, SU will slowly drop down the list knowing that it could have been moving up.
Francois

I see a lot of disappointment here in response of SU-8
Since I have been using CAD for my architectural work since 1988 I feel rather different. SU is a wonderful package made for CAD enthousiast for simple and small buildings. Of course you can do big stuff with it. The same way someone here in Holland made a viking ship of matchsticks. The majority of people don't do big stuff in SU and never will. Simply because for major organic modeling or complicated modeling involving nurbs or subdivision or parametric dimensioning etc you need a totally different approach, an approach that can only be paid for in larger projects were this effort is not too much of weigth. In such cases you get Modo, Revit, maybe Rhino, Maxwell, Vectorworks or what ever. The time invested in such applications is worth it easily. People who try to compete with SU are admirable but looking like draining a lake with buckets. Sometimes all you have is a bucket and then ok...

Experienced SU users should get out of their comfortzone and move on. Google now has for years made it clear what SU is for and what direction it is taking for further development of SU. This thread hardly teaches me anything about SU 8 other than that it is disappointing if you are a hardcore modeler who should actually use totally different software.
Or am I wrong and SU8 isn't worth it like what was said about previous updates.
Francois
PS, we decided not to upgrade...because of the crisis. Not for the price of SU itself but for the time we might need to update plugins and deal with unexpected problems.

Hi, I just made a new website with our work, all renders done with Maxwell, models made with Sketchup and Modo.
There are some models we actually made at real scale, actual timber, stones and so on...

We use sketchup for anything regular and straigthforward, Modo for organic shapes. Vectorworks is our choice for 2D drawing. It also does 3D but that's something of the past. The UI of Vectorworks is useless considering these days developments in 3D cad. I used to model all our 3D work in MiniCad and later Vectorworks.

The link to our website is here, I made it with iWeb.
http://www.fillieverhoeven.nl

Francois

The new plugin has been made available.

My wife is from the Philippines and I assure I know how people live without money. But I do not expect them to buy render applications. And neither would I if my clients would not make up for the costs.

Buts its funny that even in countries without money, the color of the rendered glass matters as much as anywere else. That's why a few of the best photographers and filmmakers come from the Philippines.

In terms of speed I don't think Thea will get me more contracts. We have 8cores mac's and in a matter of minutes we have renders good enough for communication and in a matter of hours for large prints. I am looking at +100Mb files. Actually contracts are gotten in the pub and at casual meetings with friends..... and consistently providing very high quality work.
If you are into this profession the costs of Thea, Vray or Maxwell is no issue at all. Its paid for in a matter of a few projects, less then months. Its the time invested in the knowhow that can be expensive.

Its amazing how demanding archviz really is, the slightest difference in how a pane of glass or brickwall renders makes the image look great or not good at all. For these slight differences we render with Maxwell. It saves us a lot of time finetuning an image.
If you render cars and airplanes with a lot of reflective materials your render engine is less of an issue. Those kind of images look good with most app's. But when you start to do archviz with all sorts of glass and glassprints, rough materials and materials with a lot of characteristics under different types of light and atmosphere you need the best you can get and even then in most cases its still very hard to get it right. What we can't do with Vray and Modo works out in Maxwell.

Francois

And one thing that makes Maxwell stand out is the use of Studio, an added program you can use to built huge models. I can render combinations of SU models that would not even open in SU. Once you get into photorealism its important to add detail to your models. Then quickly you will find that rendering within SU is not an option. We render SU models with cars and organic shapes found on the web that look better than real. Try to import those in SU and your lost.

Francois

a few years back I would have said to stay away from maxwell.

But the new Maxwell plugin to be released soon for Sketchup is a totally new thing and since the manual was already set online it promises to be one of the best plugins for SU to render.
Then there is a demo online showing realtime render preview with Maxwell.

I am happy to have stayed on the Maxwell train. And since we use several different modelers we can always keep the renderings in Maxwell.

We always made use of the promo's and so we paid really very little for Maxwell. Our initial license years ago was about 500 euros for in total 8 licenses. We updated 1 license to version 2 and did so for about 350 euro. Then we updated a second license to version 2 during the most recent promo for 175 euro. Can't say pricing or license policy was a hassle. Actually Maxwell's license policy is very transparent and well documented on their site.

We have made a lot of our customers happy with the typical super high quality renderings. Even at the beginning years ago, although then it was much more difficult to keep the faith.
Francois

and now this, I think we Maxwell users are going to standout in realtime preview soon.
http://www.youtube.com/user/maxwellrenderkitchen
Francois

well Jason, that does make Maxwell look very versitile.
But is that modelled with SU ? I no longer can tell since SU is such plugined package these days.

Just bought another standard license (upgrade) voor 173 euro's. Now at the office we no longer need to check who of the 2 is on Maxwell. And imagine, if we Dutch had won.... would have cost me 173 euros as well ....

Francois