Ruby experts,

Is there an a script out there for batch exporting .skp files as .dxf? Essentially, I have a lot of small SketchUp files that need to be converted into a lot of small .dxf files.

Thanks in advance for your help.

--Lewis

[Lewis Wadsworth]

I booked this a while back when one of our clients had a prototype of their hotel franchise built in Second Life for some reason. (Why do you need a hotel in a world where there is no rain, and no one gets tired, and no one need to use the bathroom? )

http://www.3pointd.com/20060929/simple-sketchup-to-second-life-exporter/

I'm afraid that I haven't pursued it farther than that, but perhaps the linked application is what you are looking for.

--Lewis

[Lewis Wadsworth]

Cheffey,

All right, I have to ask: where are the overly-developed female figures from? Are you making them yourself in Poser or is there some depository out there, a Google Warehouse for the prurient, where you can download babes?

--Lewis

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

If you like her, you should hang out in Second Life sometime. Most female avatars there seem to look like that..do you know that there are whole websites devoted to avatar pinups?...where you can decide if a given Barbie-doll avatar is "hot or not."

No, I won't give you a direct link. You have more constructive things to do with your time.

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

@ypnos1 said:

Lewis

Mass customization - very interesting please tell us more about your projects and how you have been able to utilize sketchup or other softwares to impliment your ideas.

Ypnos,

I wonder if this shouldn't be its own thread. But anyway...actually, my former instructor Kevin Rotheroe explains the mass customization concept much better than I can:

http://www.architectureweek.com/2000/0927/tools_1-1.html

That's a pretty old article...he's doing even more interesting things now. But that kind of thing is really what I specialized in when I went back to grad school at Yale to get my M.Arch. I worked for the school for four years in their fabrication lab, in fact.

All very neat and promising, just like Kevin's article implies, and this sort of work does lead one to appreciate geometric distinctions. But I graduated, the possibility of doing more research in these areas seemingly fell through, and the only architecture firm I could find that did this sort of work regularly told me that they would love to hire me but they barely made any money at this and couldn't afford more people. So now I'm just your average architect in a typical big office, I'm afraid, except that I have a house and a basement full of weird quasi-sculptural, quasi-architectural custom-fabricated stuff that is of little use except for tripping people. Since none the work I did in this area really has anything to do with SketchUp (YSOA's equipment at the time was not geared to deal with polygonal mesh files of any sort, which is why I'm rather partial to NURBS and Rhino), I rather hesitate to eat up Coen's bandwith with pictures of my experiments. Eventually I will throw together a website portfolio and I'll send you a link.

--Lewis

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

Really well done, Ypnos.

Because of my background in fabrication and mass customization, I've always scorned the notion of "organics" (we should probably really use the term "warped or non-ruled surfaces") in SketchUp when I have access to other software like Rhino. The right tool for the right stuff bit...

But looking at your tutorials I think I should reconsider. After all, a true non-ruled surface is almost impossible to create at the scale of building components, and except in limited areas we always approximate them anyway once we get to construction. If the approximation is to be loose like your saddle-shaped skylight or your chair (which are obvious nets of polygons approximating a non-ruled surface), why not use SketchUp?

--Lewis

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

I've used VRay for SU occassionally since its first Beta release...it's okay, although I often feel like I have been suckered (even though I received a pre-release discount on my license). The main advantage of VRay IMHO is speed...with the proper combination of settings, it will produce a largely-decent render faster than most anything else other than a scanline. However, despite some new effort to document the interface (the pdf manual is not the most complete or grammatically correct) it remains a frustratingly cryptic piece of software. People who have used the VRay variants for other modelers talk about "magic numbers" (sometimes called visopts) that inexplicably work whereas other, seemingly similar settings make a mess. There is a visopts repository at ASGvis (same link as the vismats, just navigate up one step to see the whole list) with one very fast visopt setting available currently.

Incidentally, having the VRay For SU6 plugin active on your PC seems to slow SketchUp down, just slightly, even if you are not doing any rendering, and especially if you have begun to apply ordinary materials to your model (whether or not you have converted them to Linked SketchUp materials that supposedly render with VRay).

The vismat material libraries at ASGvis are nice, but I'll never use most of them. You cannot see the vismat materials while you model, nor can you precision map them (which can only be done, as far as I know, by positioning textures using SketchUp's material editor and then converting those materials to Linked Materials.)

(Lewis Wadsworth)

Thanks. By the way, I went through his stucco and concrete textures and it seems they are not all tessellating bitmaps...that doesn't mean that the non-tessellating ones are useless, but they will not smoothly repeat across a face. And with clever use of the Offset filter and the Stamp tool in Photoshop, you could of course make them all tessellate.

There are a nice set of links on this site, though, to various other fabrication and 3D modeling resources. And rodeo queens.

[Lewis Wadsworth]

Glad to help, takesh. For some reason I didn't get a notification that you had responded to this thread...so ignore the email I sent you asking if you had received the models.

--Lewis

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

Takesh,

I've received your message and I sent you my test model. Let me know how it goes.

You know what's odd? I've been using VRay a lot lately, and the quality of the depth mask it produces from an SU model (assuming we have no extraneous lines or whatever) is not better than what happens with this direct SU "cheat."

--Lewis

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

It wouldn't bother me to move it to post-processing. Jackson, do you mind?

(You're right, incidentally, we should call the bug the "horizontal plane error"...that's more accurate since I don't use SU's ground plane either.)

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

@unknownuser said:

Lewis,

Sorry, I've been offline this weekend (I almost always am).

Yep, I see what you mean about the "depth map" exports- I got similar results. Bizarrely, when I exported now (with edges off) edges still show up in the exported jpg which I swear didn't occur last week.

Either way, neither of the bugs seem to affect the results enough to worry too much (although highly textured ground planes might show up the errors more dramatically). I've always found depth maps to be more of an art than a science so I'm not too worried about these glitches.

Jackson

I hadn't seen the edges bug, Jackson, but some tests I did yesterday seemed to implay that the "ground plane" problem doesn't really impact the use of the mask too much. I wish I could understand why it happens, though, since it is one of the few instances I have seen in SU where What You See Is NOT What You Get...the depth mask looks perfect on the screen. The ground plane problem doesn't seem to turn up if your ground plane is not particularly flat, or if the scale of the project is quite small, in any case. I'll write up the tutorial with some caveats about this.

I am curious to know though if all Mac users can really extract a true (or potentially true) depth mask from EPix exported files without owning a license to Piranesi. Could someone on a Mac check this? (See kdjanz' post above, first, about how he did that.)

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

I actually have a license to Piranesi 3 for PC. I just happen to really dislike that application, enough that I never bothered to upgrade to more recent versions. But it is possible to export the depth mask only from Piranesi as a TIF or some other format. It needs to be adjusted slightly, because Piranesi makes nearer objects darker as opposed to lighter, and background in SU becomes some strange blood-red color in Piranesi's depth mask that needs to be selected and filled with white in Photoshop before it will work properly with anything in Photoshop.

Here is the adjusted Piranesi-generated mask:

and here it is applied in Photoshop using the lens blur filter:

There are actually some buggy bits in the Piranesi depth mask as well...striations along the ground plane, and fringing of some kind along the roofline of the background building. Plus, of course, SketchUp's Epix exporter doesn't allow for antialiasing, which means that the depth mask produced from Piranesi has the same prevalent jaggies as the RGB image contained int the Epix file. In other words, with the exception of the problem with horizontal planes a depth mask produced using SketchUp's Fog, Styles, and Shadow controls is somewhat higher quality than one produced using Epix export from SketchUp via Piranesi.

EDIT: I discovered that if you switch Piranesi's View menu > Depth and thenexport a "depth" EPix channel as some normal bitmap (like a TIF)--as opposed to doing that while View > RGB--you end up with a higher quality depth mask that merely needs to be inverted in PS to work properly with Lens Blur and similar techniques in Photoshop. You can combine that Piranesi-generated depth mask with a straight-from-SU6 2D export at the same resolution (and with antialiasing turned on) to get a nearly ideal depth mask situation.

EDIT2: Okay, is anyone reading this and getting quite the same headache I am getting writing it? I think I'm going to call it a day and do something NOT involving depth masks and SketchUp for a while. I'll write up that tutorial tomorrow night.

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

@kdjanz said:

I did do an export to EPIX and then changed the extension of the file to TIF. On the Mac, the file opened in Preview to show that there were 3 images inside. The first was the visible scene as in SU, the second was the grayscale depth map and the third was pure white - don't know what that was about. But I could then export the second image for my own use without ever going near Piranesi.

Just thought that might be useful to you.

Kelly

EPix is supposed to be an extension to TIFF with two additional channels. I can force it to open in Photoshop, but all I find are the normal 3 RGB channels, unfortunately. What is Preview? I assume it is a Mac only program.

--Lewis

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

I've figured out that if you really want to see how a fog-derived Depth Mask is really going to Export 2D, turn off hardware acceleration under Preferences. Big planes orientated near the horizontal seem to be subject to some odd streaking and abrupt shading changes that do not effect vertical surfaces. It's nothing that couldn't be corrected in Photoshop, but it does make this a little less acceptable a substitute for true Depth Map support in SketchUp. Oh well. Should I still write up a tutorial?
http://www.sketchucation.com/scf/download.php?id=1501

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

I was writing up a tutorial on this, as Kris requested, and I noticed (in the file I made to demonstrate this effect) a kind of bug I hadn't seen in previous renderings using this techique.

Look at the original image here, direct 2D export (originally a TIFF) from SU6:

Now look at this screenshot of the depth mask mode:

This is what the depth mask looks like when exported-2D:

Obviously the terrain that the chair is sitting on is not showing the proper "depth" shading: it should start out white at the chair, and then shade to grey as it approaches the ramp that the car is sitting on. But it starts a darker grey than the ramp, and stays that way.

It doesn't really impact the final result, where I used the lens blur filter in Photoshop and the depth mask as the target:

except that the foreground chair shadow and the terrain textures are seemingly blurred more than they reasonably should be.

Jackson (or anyone else trying this), while you're playing with this technique, could you keep track of where this kind of error in 2D export occurs? Please let me know. I have several other models where this does not occur, and the depth mask exports to bitmap exactly as it appears on screen.

--Lewis

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

@kdjanz said:

Isn't the EPIX format for Piranesi basically a depth map export too? Haven't tried it myself, but I thought that one of the files exported looked similar to what you have achieved.

Kelly

I think you are correct...the EPIX format includes a z-pixel which indicates depth. Photoshop is much more common than Piranesi, though, so this hopefully will help people with PS licenses achieve depth-based manipulations with 2D exports from SU6. The third party renderers and modelers that I have used...Max, VRay, and Blender...will happily generate a true depth map, though, that can be used in conjunction with photorealistic renders from those packages.

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

I'm sort of old school Photoshop...Gausian Blur forever! But I also use this depth mask with adjustment layers, principally Hue/Saturation and Levels, to create the kind of "atmospheric perspective" fading effect that I used to do with watercolors or tempera, in the old analog days of painting.

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

It should work with any version of Photoshop that has a Channels palette...which would be all of them. I think it might work on the GIMP and related software like Cinepaint, as well, since I believe there is multi-channel support there too. But I don't think the watered-down Photoshop copies, like Photodeluxe and so forth, can use it.

poster-Lewis Wadsworth

Glad to help...I wrote something about this in the old SketchUp forums, and no one except jenujacob seemed interested, or else (I assumed) they had already figured it out.

--Lewis

poster-Lewis Wadsworth