It's up!

Got the word just now from the author, J. Leibinger.

SketchUp Extension Warehouse

Your library of custom third-party extensions created to optimize your SketchUp workflow.

(extensions.sketchup.com)

@Dave-R said:

Well, that might be a little over the top.

Cynicism is part of my survival toolkit. Especially in America.

Dave,

Oh right. It expires tomorrow. Which means we're possibly looking at no more Soap Skin and Bubble.

This is precursor of things to come with Sketchup.

Meanwhile Trimble stopped showing a monthly subscription for SU Pro on their website. Even though I still have one. Next payment is May 9th and it even says the same on my license in SU. So about 5 minutes ago I go a warning saying it was set to expire soon.

Everything is upsidedown.

Getting the same on my end. Searched and can't find an alternate download. Don't know what the situation is. I emailed the author to see if he knows anything.

@tien02683 said:

Plugin của tôi bao gồm các tính năng để tạo Bu long chi tiết. xem tại đây.

Looks useful. I can't seem to be able to get it to work. Maybe I need more coffee.

Trông có vẻ hữu ích. Nhưng tôi không thể nào làm cho nó hoạt động được. Có lẽ tôi cần uống thêm cà phê.

@panixia There's a link to grain assets but it's in a readme and it's a drx file for DaVinci Resolve. I'd look into it more this morning but at the moment I regret not having invested in a retirement plan allowing me the ability to not do anything for the rest of my life.

Thanks Mike. I'll have to check that out.

Panixia, the specific video that references the LUT I downloaded is below. There's a lot of videos that are more or less about "what's wrong with movies today." My favorites of late are "Papillon" and "In the Heat of the Night." There are many.

Maybe we can start a trend along with Hollywood? It hit me watching these videos about "today's videos" how this can apply to modern day architectural renderings and trends. You can learn from so much including watching Japanese carpentry videos that can apply to our craft.

Noise and grain...

Thanks Mike!

I'm experimenting with an Ektachrome LUT. Got the idea from watching some "what's wrong with movies today" video on Youtube. More noise, more contrast.

Some recent 3D and renderings for a house in Mandeville Canyon, California and Pacific Palisades, California. The first renderings is a redesign by me including interior design for the garage addition. The last five is the house in Pacific Palisades with interior design and renderings by me. That house was designed by Michael Lee Architects.

Just to stir things up here's Bernie Sanders on AI.

Discuss...

Overall I'm cynical about AI but I have started using it for conceptual work and creating renderings fast which seems to garner greater interest with clients.

Most of it right now is not as advertised. Particularly with architecture. I have to put text input to create the rendering I want and right when I think I'm making headway it completely changes the design.

It's hard to control textures and materials. I went from doing some AI renderings -- on ReRenderAI -- and eventually used the same SU model to develop my own renderings. It's much easier to change colors and materials from there along with design elements.

I haven't used it in weeks. I have some success using Facebook ads to get work. It's hit and miss. Prolonged messenger chats that go nowhere. Many people literally think $900 for a set of plans is too expensive.

Everything is changing which is nothing new. From the days when I first started drafting in a land survey company. Hand drafting with technical pens on vellum. To reluctantly getting a computer and learning Autocad by way of a DOS command.

So I'm willing to use AI if and when the results work and look good and maybe get me more work or more ideas from the client. I'm still using my 20+ year old Autocad. I'm half way to 70 and have nowhere to go.

@Mike-Amos Mike, yep. I am curious about Rayscraper. I've seen some really great results.

Sometimes I think about getting Thea alongside D5. It's more work for creating a render. There are times when I think D5 is a little cartoonish. It has a lot of positives. Perhaps when I was starting out using D5.

I used Twilight on a few projects at first right after using Kerkythea for a while. That was my main first rendering engine. I think there was this other Metropolis Light Transport plugin for Sketchup to experiment with.

I neglected learning rendering even though I putzed around a lot with Kerkythea. It was with Thea render when I really started to sink my teeth into rendering.

Rich, there's a long thread of crash reports at the D5 community page. One person thanked me for bringing up the Turbo Mode bug. I just tested it with Turbo Mode on and MCE set to disabled but with temp limits. It D5 didn't crash and it took 10 minutes longer to render 6 scenes. Go figure. I didn't repeat the test. I could I suppose. Three years ago D5 had the same Turbo Mode crash bug too.

Mike. Not sure yet about changing over. I've gotten so used to this D5 workflow. For now.

I narrowed it out to Turbo Mode being enabled in my BIOS. Apparently anything over the rating on my CPU will crash D5. It's the only program that's causing this. This actually happened about 3 years ago. I had to figure this all out myself. D5 should be designed to run without making these kinds of adjustments. Like all software.

Yoni said Sketchup rolled back this update. Over at the Sketchup Forum.

Yoni said Sketchup is aware of the issue and responded to him in "record time." Someone let the thing out without checking under the hood.

@Rich-O-Brien Yep. So I went ahead and left the update in place but completely replaced the js directory and it's normal again. Yoni is already checking it out. Something is wrong with one of the js (Java script) files from Sketchup.

Normal...

Well, it's one of those Monday morning's again. This time I got an update from Sketchup for Dynamic Components and it broke the Flextools dynamic component window.

See attached.

I tested this in Sketchup 2022 and 2025.

Help! I emailed Yoni about this.

Almost a month since I brought these crashes up to D5 support and still no answers. There's an obvious memory leak with this program. People should not have to adjust or degrade their operating system to run D5. It's the other way around. D5 Render should operate without users having to adjust any part of their OS, CPU, GPU or BIOS setting to use their software. It's not 1992.

How I really feel...