@Olishea - Thanks for the model links, they are great. I attached a quick render of the pollen model. I didn't have the time to let in run for a while but hopefully I will soon. I only got 10 passes on it.

@Massimo - cool wireframe material, I'm curious since twilight can use kerkythea materials if you can use the wireframe material in twilight. That would be really cool.

jsteacy

here is my attempt, twilight, mostly kerkythea materials, DOF added in photoshop, the glass chair didn't turn out the best in the render but the DOF kind of hides it. I think I need to practice using the fur plugin a little more to get a more realistic distribution of ivy. Also I think the ivy has too much of a shine to it. I used the paint (flat enamel) preset in twilight, anyone have some suggestions on a better preset?

Cheers,

jsteacy

Cool model and the render is probably better than what I could do....

As for comments, the log texture is good but I feel like it's too light, or glowing too much, maybe it's the lights. I think the level's might need to be adjusted, the sky seems darker than the model. But I could be wrong....I don't comment very often so take a grain of salt with my comments. Cool either way. Cheers,

jsteacy

@Dylan - the render is just Olishea's model with an Hdri I downloaded, I can't remember where from though.

@Olishea - I didn't modify the model you posted so I don't know how it un-softened that edge like it did....

@Massimo - I love the look of those plastic materials.

Awesome model and render!

I don't know what it is about this chair but I love it. Maybe it's the composition of the render or the form of the chair but it's all great. Being new to the rendering world I've wanted to find a good model to test some material presets (from twilight) to get a good idea of what they will do. I want to make the relation to a painter painting simple objects to learn how to paint and study objects, but that might be a bit of a stretch. Here are some of my tests created from this wonderful model (thanks for sharing Olishea!!!) I didn't really do much other than changed the materials of each of the chairs. No post pro, just tweaks in twilight with hdri studio lighting on interior+ preset 10.

Cheers,

jsteacy

Hey I work like two blocks from there, neat! It's this a proposed project or something else (school, just for fun, etc..)? I've love to see something happen there.

Very cool,

Thanks

I'm sold as well, I can't wait.

Yeah!? What's going on? I've been excited since June 15th to find out how everyone did. I don't know how much longer I can wait....the tension is killing me.

Awesome, can't wait to use these.

Cheers,

jsteacy

hybrid

Sometimes I get extra lines in my curves in layout when it doesn't exist in SketchUp. Maybe it's a hidden line that wasn't processed properly so how do I fix it? It only seems to happen in parallel projection iso views of the model (Which I use all the time!).

Any suggestions? right now I have to re-orient the model in layout very slightly and for whatever reason the line will disappear.

jsteacy

Sounds like your printing house has the problem to me. When you make a pdf from layout in vector/hybrid modes those lines should stay the same, that's one of the point of using vector art, it's resolution independent and the lines should remain true to the created pdf, if you do a test print before you send the files to the print house you should be able to gauge the quality of the lines even if the file is scaled up or down.

The neat thing about hybrid/vector files is that you can open those pdf's in illustrator and play with the lines there. It's not processed perfectly when you open it but the point is that illustrator recognizes the lines in the pdf as vector lines and retains their thickness from the pdf spot on (I just tested to make sure).

Have you tried reducing the file size of pdfs? Because if they are too big, the print house might try to process them in some sort of backwards way that messes everything up. Vector/Hybird pdfs turn out to be huge files and just the native 'reduce file size' command in acrobat reduces them significantly. I've had 5 meg file become 5 megs with no loss of quality.

jsteacy

I find printing directly from layout to be a real problem, it never gets it right. I can only imagine that the sheer size of my layout files are way too much for my printers. I've had up to 50 meg files and I just don't have the memory in the printer to handle that.

I always export to pdf then print but even then, there are some problems which, thankfully can usually be solved. My models are always in hybrid mode which tends to make huge pdfs, like 50+ megs big ( which could explain why the printer can't handle that) BUT to fix this, inside adobe acrobat you can reduce the file size which reduces the pdf so much it boggles my mind. I've had a file go from 74 megs to 5 megs. I don't know what it's doing but it works and I don't lose quality of the file.

BUT the problem is that sometimes after all of that the print still doesn't work, it prints one of the images and no lines or 4 out of 5 pages are fine and one is messed up even though the pdf looks fine. I traced those types of problems to missing reference files or ones that need updates, so see if your references are correct. Other than that I'm not sure.

jsteacy

Well the weird thing is that if I make some changes to the model, save it then update the model in layout sometimes it renders it properly without me ever touching the style settings or the material itself. Which happened to be the case for this model I was working on which magically worked after some revisions to the model. I don't get it, it seems to be a bug.

Charlie, I noticed that in the left side of the images you posted the transparency of the two pieces of wood are different in the images and I believe worked properly in the first image (Faster) but not in the second (medium). Also I just noticed, at what appears to be a bottom rail of a railing, when it hits that column it is rendered really transparent in the third image which does not seem proper to me (and is a lot more than the first image). I could be wrong though. There is definitely something wrong with looking through 2 transparent materials.

jsteacy

I have a model which I am processing through layout 2.1 where I have one translucent material over another translucent material. The problem that I'm having is that the first translucent material does not mask the second one at all. Check out the picture below. I have tried the model rendered in hybrid and raster, neither shows up correctly BUT inside of sketchup it does (see the second image). Any one got and ideas on how to solve this or work around it? Please help!

Jsteacy

Just a heads up, I downloaded the most recent version and got an error hitting the button 'get data from model'

line 157, char 2, error expected '}', code 0

which causes nothing to happen after I continue to run the script on the page.

I haven't read all the posts before this so maybe someone brought it up already but I figured since this was a new version, its a new problem.

I used SketchUp and layout to create documents that illustrate to construction trades how to properly build complicated details. The documents I produce can be anywhere from 10 pages to 30 pages in layout. In SketchUp I can have anywhere from 15 to 60 scenes and 20 to 40 layers. If you look at the attached image it shows the start and finish of how to properly install a window. The center image shows the various building materials involved in the process. This file had 28 pages, 35 scenes and 49 layers. Using SketchUp to create these types of documents is the best program I have found (especially with a few key plug-ins) but it's not perfect.

SO, I'm hoping all you wonderful scripters out there can create some scripts can help manage models with a lot of layers and scenes.

Here is the idea: Is it possible to create new layer and scene managers that allow the user to organize similar or related layers and scenes in folders under the respected palettes or windows. Not scenes and layers together but scenes together and layers together. Photoshop is probably the best example of this. In photoshop you can create a folder to place a series of layers inside of which can allow the user to minimize the contents of the folder so the list of layers is much smaller as well as can also toggle the visibility of the folder and all of its contents really easily. Anyone who has a lot of scenes and layers would find a script that could do this really helpful and I don't think it would be hard to create (could be very wrong about this) considering the power of some of the rubies that are posted here.

Anyone interested?
Thanks,

JSteacy

ok, so I want to create an onclick random zig-zagging line. So each line is a component inside a larger component. The first line has a random number for rotation (randbetween(-3,3). For the next line to be placed at the end of first one after the rotation I need to reference the value of the randbetween. But when I do this it reference the code instead of the value so I get a completely different number where I want the end value. I tried the set("attribute"randbetween(x,y) but I either didn't put it in the right place or it's not the right thing to do. Can someone help?