@andybot said: yes, shadows would very much help give yout render some depth. It doesn't look much different than what you can achieve with just a plain SU output. Maybe you can do only a shadow layer from SU and blend it in very lightly in photoshop. how would i do it? won't the SU objects [in raw sketchup export] interfere with my vrayed render jpg file? how are shadows in isolation exported?

@pbacot said: Thanks John. It looks great. I bet I can use this. Regards, Peter you're welcome pal, a lot of stuff this forum has provided me too . i became an advanced user by reading these forums. literally, some people have dug sketchup inside out . . i'm thankful to all the great great people who have provided huuuuge number of useful plugins here.

Yes John, I thought your referring about the black and white convertion... About the watercolor, I have a tutorial at the Sketchup Books section please check it out... allanx

From my Windows System Info, it appears that the Nvidea has 1.5GB Again, not necessarily all that you need. However, what you need is tempered by what you feel you can afford. May I suggest you also do maybe a googlesearch "comparison of graphics cards" which is what I did well in advance of purchasing the system I have. I do not do very much rendering. I do not do any Nonlinear Editing- which is what video folks do in post processing (and these systems apparently require a lot of horsepower). However, I find in conjunction with the Studio XPS W7 I7-930 and 8G System Ram, my Sketchup experience has significantly improved from my old XP machine which had another Nvidea card.

@tig said: You can't BUT you could change the section lines to be thin [1] with a color to match the main background [e.g. white] - edit/make a new Style... aaaah those little little things.... thanks a lot

sorry, I meant in photoshop - use the "hue/Saturation" adjustment. Adjust the saturation slider down until it looks more gray.

okay thanks

This is pretty much a description of my modeling techniques

I know of no renderers that will render a section-cut from a SKP. You have to make a copy SKP and chop it in half using Zorro on the section-plane and SectionCutFace on the faces... It's a pain but as far as I know it's the only way...

@gaieus said: You could group the model by layer with this plugin and then colour those groups (need to remove all previous materials first I guess) http://www.smustard.com/script/GroupByLayer i dont wanna work that hard . well the building is white and still in design stage. so... we're changing stuff evry now and then, manually painting is not a good solution

You're welcome John. And of course Gai is right.

okay

Some times I reduce the amount to 0.4 or 0.6 - depending on model. Rarely need to increase it. Might adjust the radius as well on occasion.

Hmm. the first thing, I,ve seen is the picture, hanging under the ceiling. Why this place??? Then I was wondering about the floortiles, I think the texture is not seemless. The same with the wood texture. And the fabric at the bed is looking strange at the sides, I think you've used a projected texture. But never the less, good start, my first renders looked terrible...

As Dave says the load order of menus AND toolbars is determined by the name of the .rb file that is either is the whole script or loads another script from a subfolder [common for more complex tools]. Renaming the files means they load in a different order. If you do rename files make sure you keep a note so if you install an update you won't get duplicated tools loading. The 'alphanumeric' oder is 0-9A-Z with no noticeable differentiation between upper and lower case letters. Names starting with !#~ etc will load in that order, before '0'. Some files need to load early and already start with those characters, don't change those, and ensure they don't loose their early 'slots'... So a renamed #Zorro2.rb will load well before Aardvark.rb etc... This tweaking of the 'load order' still might NOT produce alphanumerically perfect lists! For example a [hypothetical] script named 'TIG-aardvark_and_zack.rb' would place the two tools that it creates [named 'Aardvark' and 'Zack'] in the menu/toolbar list where 'T' falls, because the .rb file's name starts with 'T' - you can't make the 'Aardvark' and 'Zack' tools 'separate' because they are both loaded, created and the menu/toolbar lists made at the same time as the one parent file is read by Sketchup; you can move the pair up and down the list by changing the initial letter of the parent .rb file - e.g. 'Aa_TIG-aardvark_and_zack.rb' or conversely 'Za_TIG-aardvark_and_zack.rb', BUT the two tools it makes will always appear next to each other in their listings !

This isn't Sketchup's doing. The 'sort' algorithm in Ruby does a straightforward alphanumeric sort of the 'words'. It depends on ASCII code numbers etc... So punctuation (! # etc), then numbers , then some punctuation (<> etc), then uppercase letters, then some other punctuation ([] etc) and then lowercase letters etc. Paste this in the Ruby Console to see what I mean: ["zebra","Zebra2","456","123","ABC","[xyz]","[abc]","abc","<abc>","#1"].sort The 'bracketry' around the material names is to do with how they have been created/imported etc - read the Help section on this... You could use the 'display_name' [what's show in the Materials Browser] in the sorted list and then have a 'look up table' that uses the materials' 'display_name' against the actual Sketchup 'name'... BUT that some extra coding that RickW needs to do to his script. Why not PM Rick and explain the issues... Windowizer4 is a 'commercial script' - therefore posting too much of its code is 'not on' - I even worried about that one line tweak a gave you !

@jean lemire said: The apparent jerkyness of a movement is irrelevant as long as the object being moved end up at the intended position. However, this jerkiness can be minimized if SU has less geometry to show. In other words, try to minimize the workload on the GPU (Graphic Processor) by using less demanding rendering mode like shadedinstead of shaded with textures, no shadows, no fancy edge styles, etc. You can memorize rendering setups with scenes. For example, using Styles, create a minimalist rendering mode for work that you will use when modeling including moving and then create another mode that have all the bells and wistles. Create two scenes, each one using one of these styles. Disable, however, the camera position memorisation for these scenes to avoid loosing a crefully orbitted, panned and zoomed view. Once that is done, you simply click on the minimalist scene tab to work. Your model will the respond fluidly. when ready to see it in its full glory, click on the other scene tab. Note that with a relatively simple model, you shall not experience such jerkyness unless your graphic card is not very strong or you have disabled fast feedback or hardware acceleration or both in the Open GL preferences. Thank you sire for the reply . i'm using the thinline mode with no colour..[purple and white faces mode] i have disabled only hardware acceleration because when i make a selection window, the monitor goes black with lots of coloured rectangle pieces scattered over it. i still have to find a graphic card driver update. i have a gigabyte brand motherboard, they still haven't released new updates

@valerostudio said: If you want to render an elevation, I just go to that elevation, turn on perspective, change you field of view to 1 and render with the physical camera. FOV of 1 looks like an elevation. But after changing FOV to 1, render is extremly bright - nearly white. What set, change then?