Awesome! Thanks, that did the trick.
That's been the biggest visual difference between our Sketchup renders vs the max renders.

Hi All,
I am a designer for a playground equipment manufacturer specializing in custom themes and use Sketchup. There's one other guy that works with me in my department doing the same thing, but the rest of our standard designers are off site and all use Max (which works fine for standard, but too time consuming for competitive bids on custom projects).

We've built a library of our components and have them on our shared onedrive folders (copied to both his and my computer) that we can just pick our parts out of the components tray.

I have a set of VRMesh proxies that one of the Max users provided me for our perforated decks that look much better than the smooth cad blocks we've been using.

deck proxy test by Nathan Guice, on Flickr


deck proxy test a by Nathan Guice, on Flickr

I can even set this up as dynamic components, so it changes their material color with our color selections.

I've saved these to a folder that's shows up in our components tray and can add them to models on my own computer and them render just fine, but it doesn't work on other computers, they just don't show up in renders. So either if someone is building a new model using them, or opening a file of a completed structure, the proxies only render right from the machine they were originally used on.

I know proxies have to reference an external file. The proxy files are also on both machines in shared onedrive folders, Is there a way to link these to where they will work on multiple machine from the same components folder? This would be a huge help for our render quality if we can get it to work right.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Hi All,
If this has been answered elsewhere already, you can simply direct me to that thread, unfortunately at the moment I don't have time to do a thorough search.

I'm building a dynamic component master file that will control our color options on our playground equipment. Previously I've had a single that controlled all our available options for both our Steel playgrounds and Recycled Plastics playgrounds, But now we have them coming out of 2 different factories with completely different color pallets... With the exception of Custom Themed playgrounds which is my area.

With that in mind, I need to create 3 unique masters, one for steel, one for recycled and one for custom (to allow colors from both pallets).

I've handled colors by having Custom Attributes labled for each possible option (Metals, Posts, Plastics, etc) Each of these is then assigned a drop down menu of material colors for that option, which sends that down to each sub assembly.

For the sake of speed, I'd like to know if there is a way to simply copy an attribute with all it's colors to be able to reassign it to a different that uses the same materials (Metals and Posts, PanelSolid/PanelAccent, Etc). or am I simply stuck with manually filling in each line for every option imaginable?

I'm using 2017 on PC

dynamic menus by Nathan Guice, on Flickr

Thanks

I work for a playground equipment manufacturer. I've been building a library of dynamic (materials) components to be able to swap out with the low-res cad blocks when I import a new playground structure. We've got a render only department that uses 3DS Max and they have a script that runs that replaces the low res .dwg files with high res max models automatically before they render.

Are there any plugins that could recognize component names from an open model and automatically go through and replace these parts with component files from a library? Or do I need to just keep reloading these manually one-by-one?

Thanks

Ok, So I've got another question...

Our playgrounds use HDPE plastic sheet panels for barriers, activities, and graphics.
These panels come in Solid Panels which have one solid color, and Sandwich Panels with have an outer layer on either side with one color and an inner layer with another color.

The Sandwich Panels have a selection of core colors that are specific to each outer color. For instance, a Gray panel can have a Black core, a Black Panel can have a White core, however, a Red Panel could have a White core, Yellow Core OR Blue Core.

Is there a way to set up a model to have one option selection, for instance "Red with Yellow Core", "Gray with Black Core", etc. that would change both the outer and core colors?

I need to be able to limit the color options to what is actually available, but If I can't, I may just have to include some instruction for color options.

Thanks

Think I just figured it out.
This allowed me to set the sub component's color by selecting from a top-level dropdown menu.
Going to take some time to apply to all the drawings, but looks like it should work.

compattributeStructure by LodeCreative, on Flickr


compattribute by LodeCreative, on Flickr

Thanks,
I'm not sure that will work for this application. I need to be able to limit the color selection to specific colors which differ for each material.
I can set up a dynamic component to allow for that in a drop down menu, but worried if not handled as a DC it would require additional instruction for users.
Right now, I'm leaning towards collecting components on similar layers, then creating one master component with the contents of a given layer. That would allow a single drop down to change all on that layer.

I've begun working on a freelance project for a play equipment manufacturer converting several of their designs to SU for landscape architects.

I'm trying to set these up as dynamic components for material/color selection.
Is there a way of setting up a drawing to select everything on a layer to change colors together? For instance, all posts are one powdercoat color, all handrails are another powdercoat, Decks are a urethane coating, HDPE panels and LDPE roofs/slides/etc. I have each material separated on a layer (Plastics, Panels, Posts, Metals, Decks, etc)

Since these drawings will not need to maintain their individual component definitions, if all else fails, I can group everything from the same layer into one component so the user will not have to go through and select each individual part to change colors on.

That being said, is it possible to maintain each component, and have each layer change colors together? OR possibly be able to apply a color scheme (a single selection that alters each layer to a specific color based on presets)?

Any help would be great.
Thanks