Hi All,

I'm looking to have a custom plugin created that I think would be a fairly simple one.

The question is how to go about finding the right person to program such a plugin. Is there some place here on Sketchucation I can post, would I try to contact programmers directly, or maybe this is the right first place?

To give you a sense of the need, the plugin would be used to automate the creation of very simple massing models based on external data, such as dimensions, limitations on scale, basic shapes, etc. The data would be passed in from online sources, preferably directly. The output would be an orthographic or perspective view to provide simple visualizations to us quickly. As I mentioned, the key is to automate a tedious process to provide quick visualizations.

Thanks for any help.

I'm always dealing with missing textures when using Vray. I've got some workarounds but I guess I'm getting tired of the process. Here's the issue.

The convenient thing about SU is the embedded textures and you never really lose them. VR extracts embedded SU material textures and stores them in a temp folder when only the embedded texture image file is available (shown in yellow). It's possible to us the VR path editor to figure out which textures are MIA (red). There's a way to unembed them into another temp folder to point VR to them. But then these textures are all over the place. There are then yet more ways (export Collada) to get the textures all into one folder, but I don't see a way to get VR to relink all of it's textures to this path. You can do it one by one, but that's a lot of clicking.

My question is how to more simply get all the textures embedded in the SU file into one folder and then get VR to path to this folder. Or even to look for the texture there if it can't find them elsewhere.

I guess the thing I'm looking for, rather than buying yet more software, is to find a way to get my existing models, all of which are already set up to render directly to Maxwell or Vray, animated.

The nice thing about Maxwell is that it translates SU materials to Maxwell MXM files and the MXS it creates can be opened into Maxwell Studio for further refinements and rendered from there. If Vray created a file I could open in 3DS Max I would be all set, but lo, Chaos seems to like to complicate their software with incompatible material types and a distributed rendering system that defies all logic. I guess they earn their name.

We have LumenRT which looks similar, and if it was able to produce better renderings would do the trick because materials, lighting, and animation are taken from sketchup.

Lumion looks like a nice rendering software, but I don't see that it has a sketchup plugin or will even import skp files, so I don't see how it's different from anything else. Wouldn't I still have to redo all the materials and lighting?

I've decided to create some walk-throughs of several of my arch designs modeled in SU. I use the Maxwell plugin most of the time to render stills directly from SU but we also have the Vray plugin, which I also use the same way, sometimes I use both in the same project. These are both great rendering programs, both capable of doing animations, but I can't come up with a decent work-flow to get a rendering from eitherstarting in SU.

If I look to render in Maxwell (which I don't really want to do because of the rendering time involved), there's no way I know of to get SU to render a sequence of maxwell frames that can be compiled into an animation.

With Vray, it's the same problem, but at least I can export to 3ds max to set up the animation and it's capable of creating video files. But then it's a matter of exporting to 3DS, loosing all the Vray settings and material assignments in the process, and then the materials are not even compatible. There are tons of vismat materials already carefully mapped in any of these scenes and I don't want to spend the time to re-make and remap them for all these projects.

These projects are already set up with materials and lighting, so it would be nice to be able to just go directly to rendering the sequences without having to redo half the tedious work. It seems totally bizarre that it isn't more straight-forward, but maybe there's something simple I'm just missing that will save the day.