Looking good so far! I see you already discovered that the plugin is listening for material selection by eye-dropper (and vice-versa -- it will also select a material in sketchup, when you click on it in the bella settings window).

Apologies that we do not support hosting user content directly on our site, but the various developing laws pertaining to this have caused us to choose, at least for the time being, to simply not do so. So to post things there, you must host the content somewhere else (I use imgur for images) and link to it.

You should be able to do it here. Just to say, I have to step out of the office for a couple of hours. Also I am polishing a couple of scenes to put on our sample scenes page, should be ready later tonight.

Yes, CPU-only at this point, but we are working on GPU.

Any feedback will be welcome. If you like, I invite you to put any questions or suggestions on the SU plugin section of our forum, just to try and keep knowledge in a common place.

I suppose it may explain a bit if I mention that though the Bella GUI has quite a bit of scene-editing functionality, the main purpose for its existence is just to allow getting the rendering process out of host applications, so you can render in the background while you keep working in the host app.

So that's why the GUI is a bit fiddly & low-level -- our focus is on providing capable plugins, not building yet another 3D editing application.

Looking good so far, I'd say.

To go item-by-item on your list:

1. Definitely we need more in the way of tutorials. We are all programmers, so we have no marketing-type people to work on this, and we probably tend to focus too much on code. If you have any specific requests, please feel free to make suggestions.
2. For SketchUp it is necessary to use the Bella GUI to preview materials interactively. As I mentioned in a previous post, this will change once we come to making the full SketchUp plugin.
3. You can just drag panels around to stack/dock them, or close some that you don't need (you can always get them back via the File > Layout menu). You can temporarily hide all panels by clicking in the image area and hitting the D key, or you can hit F to make Bella full-screen.
4. Bella will happily render forever, continually refining the image more and more, so it is up to you to decide. When licensed, you can resume after having stopped, so it is not a problem if you initially set too little time. You tell it when to stop in the Beauty Pass settings (section A in the below image).
5. You tell Bella the file to save before rendering, using section B in the image below. This is because a main use case would be generating files to be sent to a farm. However, you can also save images while & after rendering, using the drop-down for the pass (section C in the below image).
6. There is no limitation about opening BSA files, you can open them using File > Open in the Bella GUI. However, due to SketchUp's method of installing plugins via RBZ, I do not have opportunity to put a link to the GUI on your desktop, so I recommend starting Bella from SketchUp, then right-clicking on its icon in the Windows task bar, and choosing "pin to taskbar", so you can easily open it when you like.
7. This plugin does not support multiple SketchUp Scenes, it only exports the current one. You may be thinking of a question I recently answered on this forum, about the Maxwell plugin, where someone was asking about batch-exporting multiple scenes. A similar thing could be done here, if desired. We have a command-line interface that can be used to automate rendering of multiple files.

Lastly, speaking of interiors it occurs to me to mention a limitation that can easily cause issues in SketchUp: Bella does not currently support emitter materials at the per-face level. So when making lights, you should not assign anything to faces, and instead group some faces, and apply your emitter material to the group.

It is definitely planned, when the time comes to replace this rudimentary plugin with a full-featured one (rendering inside the plugin, with interactivity, etc). Our first plugin was for Maya (naturally we support animation there), and I am now in the midst of fleshing-out our Rhino plugin -- after that, SketchUp is next on the list.

Though, we have had requests for Blender, so I may take a short detour and do something similar to this simple plugin, for Blender, beforehand. I have also had it on my list to do a simple one for Moi3D for awhile, based on OBJ export, and the GUI's import capability.

We have not yet added a combined beauty/alpha, so the way of doing it would be to set up an alpha pass in the GUI and use it in photoshop or similar. In the attached image I have added an alpha pass (you can read more here), and also added the beauty pass after it, so that they render in that order.

The trial mode is not time limited, what you are seeing now will continue to work indefinitely. Adding a license will remove resolution restriction, remove watermark, and allow resuming a render after stopping it (resume render also enables combining results of rendering a given scene on multiple machines).

For setting materials, just open the Bella Settings dialog and you will see all materials listed -- for each, you can choose a type of material from a dropdown, and set parameters related to that type.

You can also change the environment there; by default it is using a color dome with colors derived from SketchUp, but you can switch to a physical sky, or an image-based environment. In all cases, sun will be activated/deactivated according to SketchUp shadows.

Let me see about cleaning up some of my scenes and posting them on our sample scenes page.

It sounds like you have inadvertently downloaded the plugin for Rhino instead of SketchUp. The SketchUp zip will have an .RBZ file inside, which can be installed from inside SketchUp, using Window > Extension Manager.

So please check that and let me know if it gets things sorted.

[edit: ah, I see now you got it ]

Hi all, this is just to let anyone who may be interested know about our new renderer, Bella.

Bella is a state of the art physically-based spectral render which focuses on realism, predictability, and ease of use. We are a small company (Diffuse Logic) out of Barcelona -- I used to write (among others) the Maxwell plugin for SketchUp, and my colleagues were the original creators of Maxwell. So that gives some idea of where we are coming from.

We are not yet targeting the SketchUp market much, since there has not yet been time to create a full-featured plugin for SketchUp. But that said, some people requested, and I have written, a very simple plugin, to use for the time being.

So I am posting here for anyone who would like to give it a try and get involved in steering the direction -- that plugin is available here (for Windows & MacOS, tested so far on SU2017 Make, and SU2020 Pro).

I want to mention that our licensing is deliberately customer-oriented: a license covers all Bella software & plugins, and is floating & perpetual (supporting updates for 1 year from purchase), using a trouble-free text file. Unlicensed, Bella will run indefinitely in "demo" mode (720p resolution limit, small watermark, no resume render).

Our gallery is not yet very extensive, with most images still having been made personally by me -- here's a model I made (well, I grabbed the benches from 3D Warehouse) and rendered using this plugin (it is lit purely using sun & sky):

So please feel free to take a look and let us know your thoughts.

If you write the model to mxs, then reference that mxs in another skp with all the various scenes, you can use this one-liner to quickly write out an mxs for each scene:

Sketchup.active_model.pages.each { |p| Sketchup.active_model.pages.selected_page = p; puts "Exporting #{p.name}"; MX::Util.set_output_property('output.scene_name', p.name, true); MX::Export.export('mxs') }

You will want to disable scene transitions and set delay to 0 in window > model info > animation, since it appears ruby does not wait for the transition to complete between scenes. Then, you can use the network render button to set up a batch job for rendering all the mxs files.

Other ways are possible as well, since each scene is written as a camera into the mxs -- e.g. you can write one mxs, and use a python script to open it and render out each camera. But the way given above is probably easiest.

Maybe worth mentioning that if you run a program as admin, it won't see drives you mapped as your user.

Your intuition is correct -- by luck, I just happen not to have used this particular observer yet. And to follow up a bit, I'll mention, since I have been able to reproduce it independent of any 3rd-party plugin, that I've made a report for it on the SketchUp beta tester bug tracker. The upshot is: until this is no longer an issue, you should be able to work around it simply by making sure to import SKMs into your model before trying to apply them to entities. Naturally I can't give any guarantee on that, but from what I can tell, it appears to circumvent the problem.

I have reproduced it in clean SU8 installations from the initial release up through 8.0.16846. I am not able to reproduce it using my SU6 or SU7 installations.

I'll just mention that doing some more testing here, it appears that the forward slash is actually not required -- SKMs with any attribute data at all will trigger the crash. I would've sworn I had proved that was required, but I guess not.

Anyway, prompted by TIG's comments on entities observers, I have been finally able to reproduce the crash at will by writing this plugin:

     # This is an example of an observer that watches the entities collection
     # new added elements and shows a messagbox.
     class MyEntitiesObserver < Sketchup;;EntitiesObserver
       def onElementAdded(entities, entity)
         UI.messagebox("onElementAdded; " + entity.to_s)
       end
     end

     # Attach the observer
     Sketchup.active_model.entities.add_observer(MyEntitiesObserver.new)

If this looks familiar, that's because it is a direct copy/paste from the Ruby API docs.

Hi all, Maxwell guy posting in the V-Ray forum. Matthew and I have been discussing this issue over email for a couple of months now, with respect to BuildEdge PLAN, and this morning he sent me a link to this forum thread, so I thought I'd post what I know about it.

@valerostudio said:

I think something happened in a recent update that affects the way materials are handled.

That's not the case, I just tested here with BuildEdge PLAN 2.0 (I don't have V-Ray) and Google SketchUp 8.0.3117, which is the initial SU8 release, and it crashes there too. However, I tried it in SketchUp 7, and was not able to reproduce the crash.

@valerostudio said:

It has something to do with materials that have additional information attached to them. Some of your materials may have bump files or settings from other engines and you don't even know it.

To be accurate, my tests have indicated that it specifically has to do with applying a SKM which is not contained in the model, and whose attribute data contains a string with a forward slash. That is why it affects SKMs written with render plugins active -- commonly, the data you need to store includes file paths with forward slashes. There could be other problem scenarios, this is just the one I've identified.

If you want to reproduce the issue, here are steps by which you should be able to do it, with as many variables removed as possible. You should perform these with all plugins uninstalled, except for the one you think is triggering the crash, apparently meaning V-Ray or BuildEdge PLAN:

1. Open SketchUp, open the Ruby Console, and run this one-liner:

Sketchup.active_model.materials.add('m').set_attribute('d','k','/')

2. Drag the new "m" material out into a library to create a SKM.
3. Select the new "m" SKM and attempt to apply it to an entity.
   Upon executing step 3, SketchUp should immediately crash. Note that you should not drag the SKM into the model materials before applying it, otherwise you will not trigger the issue -- just select the SKM in the material browser, then try to apply it to an entity. My guess is that the affected plugins are not doing anything wrong, and that this rather points to a bug in SketchUp. Plugins may be able to work around it by changing some code, though.

Seeing as how I have only personally reproduced this with BuildEdge PLAN, I have not reported it to the SketchUp people as a potential bug yet, and have rather reported it to the BuildEdge people, since they have the code capable of triggering it. I would have reported it to SketchUp, but I have not been successful in writing a test plugin that shows similar behavior.

Just a note on the original topic, it reminded me of once when a user sent me a problem scene that was screwing up my webdialog. The problem turned out being that one of his material names had a leading control character -- unit separator, which is not printable, but which you can enter into a SU material name by hitting ALT+031. I don't recall precisely in what way that was tripping things up, but thought I'd mention it anyway.

@andybot said:

One prominent example I'd like to throw out there is the Maxwell plugin "Fire" RT window. There is no obvious button to start the render, but instead gives you what looks like a title in the upper left corner. You just have to guess how to start the thing. It looks nice, but to me, it's mystery meat navigation at a quite critical place in the app.

The design you refer to was arguably logical in the context in which it originally appeared; the button used graphics matching those used to start Maxwell Fire in Maxwell Studio, such that any Maxwell user would immediately have understood its purpose. Indeed, though, it made far less sense in the context of the standalone plugin.

So in light of that, I made two major changes in the first update after the introduction of the standalone. First, I added an option, enabled by default, for directing the window to auto-start the export/render upon opening the window. Second, seeing that the majority of users would now likely have no idea what goes on in Maxwell Studio, I redesigned the entire window:

That's what it now looks like when first opened; if you have not disabled the auto-start option, then once the model has been exported, those graphics & links in the main area slide away. I hope you think this is an improvement.

You can use any size film in Maxwell, but not in the plugin, since it places first priority on providing a wysiwyg workflow within the context of SketchUp. In other plugins, I have provided tools for visualizing (using an overlay, via OpenGL or whatever is available) the Maxwell film size & location (given lens shift) with respect to the associated view as it is composed in the host application, which is not generally capable of displaying perspective based on arbitrary film sizes. It is on my list to do this here as well, at which point you would see film size parameters show up in the plugin, but it does not exist yet.

@andybot said:

I just wish I knew what was controlling the depth, it must be some internal SU distance.

If you set the camera's Focus to Manual, then you set the focal distance by enabling the Set focal distance tool (found in the menu & toolbar) and picking points in the model. Additionally, there are three Auto-focus modes: Spot, Average, and Average + DOF. If you use Spot, the plugin samples the center of the image to find the distance. If you use Average, it uses the average distance of several samples. And if you use Average + DOF, it performs the Average sampling, then adjusts fStop (while maintaining exposure) to ensure that objects lying within the range are in focus.