I would like to see a skybox as parallax-invariant background that is also not trimmed off by the far Z plane. Either from an equirectangular panorama or six cube faces. Transparency to be allowed (so the blue-ish sky comes through, and the sun and shadow algorithms should take the skybox into account. Or maybe even a Preetham-style sky colour skybox with a "sun" with lens flare?

@jbacus said:

Hi Howard,

We decided many years ago to stop updating our ArcGIS plugin in favor of native support from ESRI. This page is a good place to start learning about the new features in ArcGIS.

Is there something about our old plugin that you prefer over ESRI's native support?

john
.

Definitely. The ArcGIS->SU export is one perfectly georeferenced SKP file; TIN, shp outlines, points, rasters, all included. All can be combined or the shp outlines draped into the tin (sandbox).

The new workflow creates multiple DAEs, and they are not gereferenced, but zero-centered. The proposed workflow is much more primitive and useful to replace just one "extruded box" building with a more fanciful one, but nothing for complicated multi-feature structures. If the DAE is equipped with something like a cellar, the structure will even be lifted on re-import into ArcGIS. A nightmare!

I only ever used the 9.3->SU directional export and did my models in SU7, 8, 8pro. Going back is possible, in principle, with a DAE import and moving the multipatch by the center offset values stored in the GeoReference dictionary, in inches.

So, at the moment, I need a double-install, ArcGIS10 in Win7 plus a virtual XP with 9.3, just for the ArcGIS->SKP plugin. Would it be so hard to bring it back? Just the exporter to SKP, please!!!

Yess, finally, a really good exporter - Huge models (forget Pro!), difficult models, I can remove all other half-baked solutions!

I rarely get emoticonal, but Three Cheers to You!

OK, the missing face is now here, but some components are misplaced. Getting close...

I had seen the error following the Ruby message and fixed it, thanks.

My model may indeed have ungrouped geometry on a hidden layer, most likely some ungrouped edges without faces used during construction only, and also typically hidden. Also there are real construction lines, on a usually hidden layer. I am still learning, and may have made some mistakes or things not recommended but possible. However, from the 2.2 export, still one face in a non-mirrored component inside a locked group is missing, and the reported message and behaviour persists. The Pro export in this case has no problems. I can PM you the model to try/bugfix/bulletproof your exporter, if you like.

Again the queation, is there any chance the model itself gets modified during the export, as the intermediate message seems to imply?

Thanks a lot for 1.8 (for my large model) and explaining the differences. 2.0 finally came to an end, after about 6 hours. The model is technically simple enough to hope 1.8 will do.

I tried the 2.1 export on a different, quite complex model with lots of layers and some hidden and, yes, mirrored instances. After a while, a message popup says (I try to translate from the German SU8pro): "By your last action visible geometric shapes were joined to existing geometric shapes on an invisible layer." The model behind the panel looked weird, with lots of missing faces. After closing the panel the export then continued. The message and in-between appearance imply an unwanted edit operation, so I don't dare saving the SKP afterwards. However, after the export, it seems OK again - is there any chance/danger that something is actually edited? On the other hand, the OBJ misses a few faces. The 2.0, which gives the same message, looks worse, with some duplicate and maybe inverted faces in addition to the missing ones, so 2.1 is better, but I am afraid still some work is open. Just to let you know. Again, splendid job, I was disappointed with the Pro export.

Hi!

First, thank you for this superb OBJ exporter! I have previously used V1.6 for a large model (about 450.000 triangles mostly from a terrain TIN, counted by Meshlab), which took about an hour to export. The result looked perfect in Meshlab. All other OBJ exporters I tried including the Pro failed on that, so I warmly recommend yours. However, the V2.0 is not finished on the same model after 4 hours. (Win7pro, Core2duo, SU8pro uses 1GB RAM, lots of RAM free.) Was there any big change in the algorithm that causes this? Is it possible to find and try V1.7..1.9?

Kind regards,
Georg