The toolbar problem seems to turn up on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu. It would be interesting to know if it exists on WINE on other distros.

Al Hart? Care to explain these things?

@stu said:

...it was challenging, edgy, regularly informative...[for GoD, that is]

Don't forge troll-ridden. Jimmy (let's not fool ourselves about who "GOD" is) is a troll, who gets his jollies playing cruel mind games on newbies. Why not invite Cornel back as well, so we can get our fill of homophobic non-sequiturs, too?

?eter, are you experiencing the lag in hiding/showing/zooming that I noted in my previous post? It's only slightly annoying (much less annoying than trying to get dual monitors to run on Ubuntu), but I'm curious to know if anyone else has had the problem or had it and done something about it.

Well, I've used fiber-reinforced concrete of various kinds. This looks like a fancy upmarket version of that.

Anecdotally, the old fashioned type with the steel fibers was a little scary. You could get the fibers in your skin or lungs if you weren't careful, and then they would work their way out somewhere else in your body.

If you go to a local mason's supply and tell them you want fiber-reinforced concrete, they will have it in bags. They might be able to sell the fibers to you in bulk, so you could mix in the reinforcing yourself (this is how you get fibers IN you, incidentally).

For this material, call the NA distributor and say you would like to get a sample.

Sigh...something else I have to learn how to use now.

Amazing, zap!

I'm sorry, I meant the moderators in general...I remember seeing the warning posts.

@jackson said:

Re: Goon's "secret" identity a quick search of the old SU forums for the key phrase "good ole boy" came up trumps, landing right on suspect #1.... answers on a postcard please. Let's just say this is probably the first time I agreed with one of his posts.

I thought you banned that guy even before I quit as a moderator...I'm leaving if he's posting.

Goon seems a bit overly familiar for someone who has only posted 15 times before. I think we know him under a different alias. Quick: can anyone here think of a previous forum member with an ego big enough that he would choose a nickname that abbreviates as "GOD"?

There is a material library built in to SketchUp (Windows menu> Materials), and more materials are available from Google here.

However, pegboard materials (with transparent holes) are really easy to make with Photoshop or GIMP.

pegboard.skm
pegboard_nicer.skm

There's a utility included called "3DSnip" that will capture OpenGL or DirectX rendermeshes displayed currently on the computer in other applications, and then allow them to be opened in this app for rendering, like that 3DVia offering or Ogle. There's no compatible 3D export format with SU, though (OBJ is the closest...you'll need a translator) if you want to bring the captured meshes into SU for editing. It would be nice if this thing could output 3DS files, but it is still a neat little plus. (Incidentally, it will capture GE buildings, but there seem to be some issues with textures that I haven't figured out yet.)

I've also noticed that it will not recognize about 50% of the materials on the SU models I have imported into it...I think it refuses to bring in positioned materials. (EDIT: re-imported the file and this time they appeared? Why not the first time?) It also freaks out if there are too many other graphics apps running...with Firefox, GE, and SU all open at once, the viewport of 3D PaintBrush becomes a choppy mess (and I have 768 MB of VRam available on my NVidia 8800 Ultra--multiple graphical apps are usually not a problem). I'll have to test it more some future time...I've lost patience for the moment.

@unknownuser said:

@kevsterman said:

I promised myself I would not let it become a decade.

I did...it becomes harder and harder to get people to take one and one's art degree seriously, the longer one coasts on it. After 11 years I couldn't stand it and I went and got a grad degree in architecture.

This is very interesting, stinkie (can you give us a real name, sometime?). There's a kind of an exacting minimalism...almost grim and reinforced by the gray color scheme...that suits the High Modern subject matter very well...and yet you're marketing it not as architectural visualization but as an art object unto itself.

I would be tempted to fill the image a bit more and crop it around the structures...but then, you might lose the implied assertion that this building was conceived of as an object alone, as opposed to part of an environmental and built context (one of the sins of which High Modern architects are now often accused).

Seems to work fine with an NVidia 8800 Ultra so far...but I'm on XP, not Vista.

This is a very promising program.

692. Linux!

@unknownuser said:

Wow, Lewis, "likely-frauds", "drudge-serf", that is cynical - but real. I appreciate your candor, it's exactly what I was looking for (whether good or bad). You present two paths, professional and academic - neither is appealing from what you describe.

Actually, I really don't intend evil. Keep in mind my little preamble about my talk with Tom Kundig, earlier in the thread. After all, he doesn't seem so bitter and cynical now. I'd like to hope I won't be this bitter in twenty years, but then I took a different route than Tom at a later point in my life...none of us really tread the same path.

(Incidentally, Tom really is a great architect, whatever the quality of his advice to me. He deserves every prize he has received...in fact, he got another one since we started this thread.)

Finally had a chance to work through the Piranesi tutorials, so here's the first result.

A higher resolution version of the same image is available in this gallery on Picasa. (The faked "etching texture" of the background texture is more visible in the higher res version.)

I rather disliked the original view towards the South (north elevation in perspective) shown in the first post of this thread because of the non-human (but not particularly bird-like) point-of-view. This is more reasonable, from eye-height for a 6' tall human. Pity it's too late to re-submit the image.

I'm finding Piranesi to be a fight...so far, it seems to be the most expensive Photoshop accessory ever (as far as I am concerned), because almost inevitably the output needs pixel-scrubbing and layering in ways that don't seem easily achievable with Piranesi alone. I'm not sure I like this as much as the "bad photocopy" pre-Piranesi NPR renderings posted before, although it is in fact much more like a Schuiten-type illustration (which may not be a good thing--there's something deceitful about faking older illustration media with digital means. This is not a pen-and-ink drawing, anymore than a VRay rendering would be a photograph).

Tim,

Would it not be possible to do this with a normal-mapping utility, like xNormal? Export a textured and mapped 3DS from SU, bring it into xNormal, do the magic, and then re-export it to SU as a 3DS again? I found this program months ago, and I haven't had a chance or reason to try this, as no one requires animations of me. An alternative might be Crazybump.

I know these programs can bake bump maps and textures, but I'm not sure about shadows.

It looks like xNormal could be used for rendering on its own, and it's free...Windows only...I'll download it and give it a shot this afternoon.

Results: the rather confusing xNormal manual (178 pages of technical jargon and slightly strange grammar!) calls what Tim is trying to do with baked-in shadows and textures "dark mapping." However, it didn't like any model I currently could throw at it to try it out...I kept getting out of RAM errors. In any case, xNormal is only designed to generate the maps...it can't apply them to the model, so I would have had to resort to some other programs anyway if it didn't crash. The primary purpose of this utility is to create (from a high-poly model with multiple detailed maps) a normal-map (a single bitmap produced by combining textures, bumps, ambient occlusion, etc. into one file) suitable for simulating detail on a low-poly copy of that original model. I could see this being useful in a system of bringing low-poly copies of high-poly models into SketchUp without blowing up the file size, but I don't really do this often enough to struggle with it now.

More SU on WINE on Ubuntu 64-bit notes:

I installed this again yesterday (had to wipe a partition...turns out that having 64bit and 32bit versions of Ubuntu on the same drive can be problematic) and tried to do some actual project work with SU once I had it going.

With another couple of minor WINE updates, SU now installs with no differences from the Windows installation process, as long as one allows WINE to install Gecko so that it can render HTML (used in the SU TOD window, for instance). Layout still doesn't work at all, although you must allow the Installer to pointlessly download .NET before it will continue with SU's installation.

There is a noticeable problem, once SU file sizes get a little bigger in this system: certain visual operations don't immediately appear on the screen. For instance, a zoom extents operation does not complete (or perhaps the window simply doesn't redraw) until one clicks somewhere in SU and begins another operation; the same sort of thing happens with hiding/unhiding objects. This can get a little tedious when editing groups and components...it is difficult to know, until you start another operation, whether a component/group is open for editing or not.

Also, 2D exports to DWG format failed about 50% of the time with a Bugsplat, although when they did work they were completed in about half the time it takes on Windows XP. Graphic exports to PNG and JPG complete much, much faster than they do on Windows...almost instantaneous with large resolutions (3000-4000 pixels) and shadows/anti-aliasing on.

I don't have a car, but then I live in the middle of a large city with an extensive mass transit system (which actually would get me to the edges of NYC's mass transit system, if I wanted to go to the trouble of spending a day on commuter rails). I haven't owned a car in four years, and I rarely miss it. When I travel, I go out of my way to not have to get a rental (for instance, I used CalTrain to get from the Googleplex to San Francisco after the 3DBC).

However, my wife has a Prius, so we aren't entirely auto-free here, even if I rarely ever ride in it. After our first child was born, we discovered that the MBTA is not particularly baby-carriage-friendly (I hate to think what it must be like for the wheelchair-bound). Once our youngest is capable of walking to school (about a fifteen minute walk for me, but a bit much for a toddler), I assume that we will dispense with the Prius as well.

I'd not just quit using SketchUp, but probably also pile ALL of my computers in a mound out back, spray them with lighter fluid, and toss on a lit match...that's how cool I think it would be.