Very nice!

Along with the two posts above mine, I’d be interested in seeing some tips on your workflow. Obviously, start with parallel projection for camera view...

Simply incredible! Now I have to resist the urge to play with this instead of working on my clients’ projects today.

@skalp said:

No this will not work with VRay.

The Skalp Team

Sorry to hear that.

Layout and Skalp allowed me to drop the abomination that is AutoCAD.

@juju said:

Skalp definitely takes SketchUp to the next level in doing construction documents.

A question - the Thea Render integration is great, but will it work with others (VRay)?

@kevsterman said:

Steve, I could kiss you! I've been wanting to be able to see thumbnails of my SU files since I got my mac 4 years ago. Thank you so much for this tip!

+Eleventy! No idea why SU doesn’t bother to support this. I’ve missed it ever since it was dropped.

@jql said:

It's not free. You have to pay it to use commercially or in education (not if you're a teacher though...)

Ok, I’ve been using SU since before Google, so I wasn’t aware of the non-commercial use under Trimble (just read up on that).

@ontaotto said:

I know where your comments go, yeah to me is pricey too what Trimble asks for SketchUp license, obviously is not the same vein in no single order, both programs are quite different.

I don’t know, I do everything I used to do in AutoCAD for about 10% of the price with SketchUp - and SketchUp does offer the free version if you don’t need layout and such features. No complaints here.

No, that was what was confusing me. I had downloaded a model from the 3DWarehouse, but wanted to modify the materials being used. There were enough that I was looking for an easy way to strip them out rather than right clicking on each and every material and editing them individually - hence doing a search and finding fast_tw.

Playing around with fast_tw and other materials, most of the time someone names the JPG the same name as the material they create. In this case the materials were things like “Material001, Material002, Material003…” while the JPGs were named “4IASae2uulg1, NX054xYNCb63, QtIJ9RU2U1Mj…”

To me, it would seem that would make it very difficult to keep things organized during the creation of the materials, but some people seem to just make things more difficult than they need to be.

Ok, I finally went in and made a copy of one of the SKM files, renamed it to .ZIP, opened it, and looked at the files. The JPG file in there has the alphanumeric filename I’m encountering. Doing the same with some other materials gets a filename based on the material name.

So, in this case, the materials I’m trying to work with just have random alphanumeric filenames for the JPGs they originally created the materials from - so that is all that fast_tw is able to extract. It’s a fault of the materials I’m working with and nothing to do with fast_tw.

Note these lines from above:

@tig said:

The original fast_tw.rb works in v2014, but is Ruby Console run.
This attached version is the same as the one in the PluginStore's RBZ.

So the one in the PlugInStore is the first generation - and runs in the Ruby Console. The 3a and 4 versions are updates that run in menus.

But I still get the same results in any of them - that I get alphanumeric strings for file names instead of the material names that were in the SKP file.

I tried 3a and 4 from TIG’s post:

@tig said:

The original fast_tw.rb works in v2014, but is Ruby Console run.
This attached version is the same as the one in the PluginStore's RBZ.
[attachment=2:3ie6v21l]<!-- ia2 -->fast_tw.rb<!-- ia2 -->[/attachment:3ie6v21l]
The Depot's fast_tw_3.rb is menu driven and has several extra options.
It is compatible with v2014.
This has some issues, which my post a little earlier explained how to fix.
This attached version has those issues fixed.
I have incremented it to fast_tw_3a.rb
[attachment=1:3ie6v21l]<!-- ia1 -->fast_tw_3a.rb<!-- ia1 -->[/attachment:3ie6v21l]
In an earlier post in this thread another version of the RB was attached [confusingly with the same version suffix].
This is also menu driven and includes several additional options.
BUT this one is full of coding issues and it is NOT compatible with v2014.
This attached version has those issues fixed and is now v2014 compatible.
I have renamed it fast_tw_4.rb for the avoidance of doubt.
[attachment=0:3ie6v21l]<!-- ia0 -->fast_tw_4.rb<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:3ie6v21l]

@aceshigh said:

Can I make an improvement request? It would be nice if you could choose if you want the texture exported with the MATERIAL name (as it happens now) or the original texture name, if available.

I’m trying to use fast_tw on OSX 10.9.5 and SU 2015 and I’m getting file names such as "fa3c172f4fc034eb6af0489c89b26612.jpg” for everything. From the comment above, am I understanding correctly that it SHOULD save the files with the MATERIAL name you’d see in SU?

I’ve tried using both fast_tw_3a.rb and fast_tw_4.rb with the same results.

Easiest way is to use the tape measure to measure the 1m portion and then type in 5cm at the dialogue. SU will ask if you want to resize the model - accept yes.

Much appreciated! Had to do a quick electrical plan, so did a search to see if anyone else had electrical symbols rather than starting from scratch.

I did have a brain fart, downloaded both files, and then wondered why only the one worked...

I do wish that scrapbooks were easier to edit. Haven't upgraded to SU2013 yet - have they improved things there at all?

On a different scale, I've had a few clients - mostly residential - who have likely watched TV shows like HGTV's Design Star and feel that I should "compete" against other architects/designers/homebuilders for their business. Understandably, we all compete. But these people were asking for fully fleshed out designs from each "contender" and would supposedly "award" the project to the winner. Obviously, coming up with the design concept is the grand portion of such a project. I'm more than willing to go over past samples of work and to discuss the design process with them, but I'm not going to "compete" for a project under those terms. I'd fully expect the client to take the "winning design" to a drafting service or just turn it over to a contractor for construction.

I'm sorry. I thought I had posted another followup to this thread.

I was able to send a reduced file in to SketchUp to see if they could find out what was going on. I sent in three pages of the file to illustrate the issues that I was having with it.

They replied, saying that the file itself was corrupted. Apparently they are aware of this issue, but it does not happen frequently so they are having some difficulty finding a fix for it. They did give me some suggestions on a workaround involving changing the layer state from "on every page" and back to "on single page." Unfortunately, this wouldn't work for me as I had several pages with different information on each page on that layer - using that workaround would have consolidated all of the information from each page and put it on every page.

However, I was able to duplicate the page that I was experiencing problems with, delete the original page, and then rename the new page back to the original name. That seemed to solve the problem, although I had tried that before and it did not work.

I also have no idea if the corruption was prior to the update to M4 and M4 just brought it out, or if M4 was somehow responsible for the corruption.

In any case, I was able to salvage my file and continue working on it.

When I had uninstalled SketchUp per their instructions, instead of deleting the files I saved a copy of everything - just in case. I've actually reinstalled the old files rather than having to go through all the setup procedures for my plugins and other add-ons. I'm glad I did so. As far as I can tell, there is no difference in operation between the reinstallation and the initial update to M4 now that the corrupt file is fixed.

I use Maxwell on my Mac setup: http://www.maxwellrender.com/index.php/maxwell_for_google_sketchup

Best part - it's free! And integrated into SketchUp, so you don't have to port it to another program. If it isn't rendering the way you want, stop the render, make your adjustments in SU, and press the render button again.

I also use VRay, but Maxwell can give me a quick render without a lot of work when I want to show a progress image.

Unfortunately, the ones I'm having issues with are all on current projects. Wish I had something on a past project or sample I could send, but I haven't been able to recreate the problem in a new file - partially because I haven't tried to recreate a 15-page Layout file with a dozen SketchUp model files and such just for testing purposes...

Due to workflow, I waited until this weekend to go through the whole process of uninstalling and reinstalling SketchUp and Layout. With a clean install - and before adding any plug-ins or add-ons to the mix - I tried opening one of the Layout files that I had previously had issues with.

Nope...

Exact same problems as before...

Crap...

Another email in to SketchUp to see what to do next. I'm not sure if the file got corrupted by the previous installation of Layout? Or if it is some other problem.

SketchUp has the ability to check a file for errors and to fix them. I see that come up every now and then. I'm unaware as to whether Layout has a similar feature or if there is a way to check whether the file is corrupted.