If you want silhouette shadows is Thea, using frontal projection is the way to do it. But if simple "attaching" a model on a HDRI is enough then using shadow catcher is must.

Nice HDRI samples!

@liam887 said:

I also brought the machine into work for IT to look at, would point to a hardware failure.

For me at work it's pretty rare to see hardware failure with NIC (IRL working as a team leader for the onsite IT support team for a organization with 700+ workstations ). For this year I think I seen only one failed NIC (HP JetDirect card).

Anyhow HW failure sounds possible in your case. There is still a little change that some BIOS setting is causing the issue (example some motherboards will start dropping packets if two onboard NICs are enabled (some intel issue). Enabling UEFI boot also may mess NIC (another intel issue).

Btw starting windows with safemode with networking can reveal if some other program is messing the network stack in normal mode. Did take while to recall, that some failed installation of a security program can mess system similarly.
http://support.microsoft.com/mats/program_install_and_uninstall/en-us may help...

@nickchun said:

Twilight and Thea were developed from Kerkythea (which is free, but takes longer to learn) Materials from Kerkythea can be used in Twilight, so you can develop your own materials in Kerkythea and use them in Twilight. Twilight is well worth the money but if you are really strapped for cash try Kerkythea first.

Twilight uses the render engine from Kerkythea, but Thea render has different core and material system (even the developer is same as with Kerkythea). Thea can import Kerkythea scenes, but it does a one way conversion.

About twilight renderfarm, there is one beta (that actually is Thea based and uses Kerkythea to Thea conversion) at http://renderact.com/. Possible other Thea render farms may accept Kerkythea XML scenes
http://www.thearender.com/cms/index.php/resources/render-farms.html

@solo said:

@unknownuser said:

Interestingly my Windows experience number has dropped from 8.0 to 7.7 since downgrading the OS.

Because Windows 8 is actually leaner and faster than Windows 7, and because MS wants you to upgrade those greedy bastards. I run Windows 8 on my laptop and wife's surface tablet and it is screaming fast, IE 10 still sucks however, Chrome is very stable on W8.

Not 100% sure, BKT maybe win7 and win8 experience numbers are not campatible. Anyhow, win8 is supposed to perform better when multithreaded apps are run.

MattC, that sounds great! Cannot wait.

@unknownuser said:

...
i think they (google & other mapping services) just came to realize they can use satellite imagery to get better data than the 'millions of people drawing their neighborhood' approach..

...and not to forget lidar scans (Possible one good reason why Google and Trible did found eatch others)

Perhaps need of some massive point cloud handling will in some point trigger 64 bit switch on SU.

@thomthom said:

@jason_maranto said:

Every workable solution I've seen requires the user to leave SketchUp -- which by definition means it fails as a host.

The render engine can pipe the data to a 64bit process - so only the UI is hosted under the 32bit environment of SketchUp.

Perhaps platform specific solutions (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel.netnamedpipebinding.aspx)? If so, then multiplatform programs could have issues (or at least do require more work). Like said, communication between 32 bit process and 64 bit is possible, but for some reason it's not used that often... I am pretty sure that there must be some good reasons for that

I'm fairly sure that in some point there will be a critical momentum when a mass of professional users will actually start to look on a other solution. At the moment SU definitely delivers on a certain level (in my use at least ), but I have to say future is foggy.

I have used SU about 7-8 years. In that time I have managed to convenience several people to start using it. Unfortunately now I personally know many who are looking a alternative. Have to admit it's not just because of lacking with 64 bit, but simply they need a tool that can produce and handle huge amounts of polygons (for a render engine ) and they also seems to prefer ongoing development that's actually happening with some competitive products.

What I have seen is that they tend to jump on Rhino or 3DS Max, some even to blender.
Also SU is getting a stronger and stronger hobbyist stamp and that might also affect. If brand/product gets a stain, it's hard to win back a lost customer.

@jbacus said:

improvements for developers: Rendering engines (mainly, V-Ray; to a lesser degree, Maxwell) should be able to execute 'inside SketchUp' in a 64-bit environment, rather than running their rendering in their own thread.

3rd-party rendering engines are free to execute operations in 64-bit environments if they design their architecture to do so. Many of them have done so today— there are significant architectural advantages to doing so. Some renderers, like Maxwell, market the ability to execute in a 64-bit environment (as well as the ability to do things like distributed network rendering) as an advanced feature that justifies purchasing their "Maxwell Studio" rendering suite.

Well... I am not a programming guru, but I have understood that there are actually some benefits if a renderer can operate in context of SU, if SU stays in 32 bit - we can only load 32 bit dll and so. If SU where 64 bit, communication between SU and 64 bit renderer would be (much) simplified - not need for RPC or some other kludge.

I sure can understand thinking 32/64 bit with "SU" goggles... then 64 bit may not sound tempting; a lot of work for 64 bit conversion, no speed benefit,... But maybe think it as a investment for the future and imago development - a positive mojo.

I'd prefer hosts file to be clean and locked so that malware cannot change it. If you let any program to modify hosts... results can be surprising if you forgot it (or someone else uses computer that don't know that hosts file is modified). To protect hosts, you can take ownership of hosts. Then disable inheritance. Remove the modify permission from SYSTEM. Make sure you or even better a secondary administrator account only have full control on the file (don't mess with system if you don't know what to do).

For blocking certain domain/ IP - use a firewall or some DNS proxy can be used, like http://sourceforge.net/projects/acrylic/, http://www.peerblock.com or similar... and naturally for name resolution better use DNS, like usually, not a relic "hosts" file.

BTW Windows defender in Windows 8 may overwrite your hosts file entries, so better have also a firewall at "router level" on your network (keep in mind that NAT is not a firewall). If I have understood correctly in Windows 8 facebook.com and ad.doubleclick.net cannot be blocked by hosts file when defenter is used... might me more.

@stefanq said:

The question is why, on every reviews I watched, the thermal paste was applied onto the processor, with different techniques of course (little dot, line , spread etc.)

A small dot and pressure from heatsink works generally well, hand spreading the paste may be messy.

Btw if you want to create a own virtual studio using HDR textured light source models, then Lightsmith Collection at http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html is a good start.

@unknownuser said:

any word on this gai?

I been wondering that too.

@unknownuser said:

@liam887 said:

I would look at GPU rendering rather than CPU based. Only so much you can do now days with CPU rendering.

Personally I would opt for a Nividia GTX Cuda enabled card. I have the GTX 980 but you can get a cheaper card that does an amazon job. Stay away from AMD!!

But this common rendering engines as KT/Twilight/Thea/ (or others) are specialized to use CUDA ? I know there are some used for dynamic lighting and real-time rendering, but I'm not using such software...

Thea will have GPU rendering relatively soon (most likely with the next revision). As it's CUDA based, a nvidia card with as much ram as possible is needed. I'd pick some 6xx with 4GB RAM (also 5xx card will do). Naturally Thea will continue to work just fine with CPU too.
About AMD vs Intel, with heavy multithreading AMD FX-8350 is somewhere between Core i7 2600K and 3770K from Intel (based on multiple reviews, note. with some reviews it's between Intel Core i5 2500K and i7 2600K), so it's possible that will FX-8350 give more bang for buck, when used in rendering (multithreaded).

Based in google search, there seems to be at-least 4000 similar proposals. Did search "Looking for a designer/drafter who is very capable in all aspect of residential design from conceptual design phase through construction document phase"

Also a person "Muti Feldbrand" seams to search help for various design issues here and there.

@solo said:

The problem I have is many of my programs like render apps have materials mapped to certain drives, if I start changing stuff around I will lose all my texture mapping, so, Is there anyway I can transfer my materials folder (57GB) to a new drive and still keep the paths without having to remap all models again?

Probably best way to handle this is via symlinks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link

Example with Thea materials, first backup "C:\ProgramData\Thea Render\Materials". Delete the material folder "Materials". Create junction pointing to a new empty folder (d:\Thea Render\Materials) in other drive. Restore files back to "C:\ProgramData\Thea Render\Materials".
For junction creation start cmd prompt via "Run as administrator". Then change path to C:\ProgramData\Thea Render

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C;\Users\pjl>cd "c;\programdata\Thea Render"

c;\ProgramData\Thea Render>

Now create junktion pointing to d:\Thea Render\Materials (Remember to create the new material folder first on d:).

c;\ProgramData\Thea Render>mklink /J Materials "d;\Thea Render\Materials"
Junction created for Materials <<===>> d;\Thea Render\Materials

if you are going to use network drivers, then junktion will not work, you must use symlink /D -parameter instead of /J.

c;\ProgramData\Thea Render>mklink /D Materials "x;\Thea Render\Materials"

Where x: is mapped network drive. Or if you prefer UNC paths

c;\ProgramData\Thea Render>mklink /D Materials \\server\Materials

@bob james said:

@unknownuser said:

Graphics tablet isn't intuitive for me....you are looking at a screen but drawing somewhere else. Kinda like rubbing your belly while patting your head.

How true.

@notareal
The link to http://www.yiynova.com does not work.

Maybe this will work better http://avyy.org/ or http://www.amazon.com/b?me=A12GIJLV896YB3&ie=UTF8&qid=1359317398

What about Yiynova tablet monitors or digitizer displays, anyone tried or seen one in use? http://www.yiynova.com/En/products.php?fid=1
Yiynova DP10HD sounds interesting http://www.amazon.com/Yiynova-DP10HD-Digitizer-Display-Windows/dp/B008EYA9EG/