Posts made by panixia

@Rich-O-Brien looks interesting.. is it robust enough to open complex stp files or it's meant to be used only for small objects?

@erikcoleman1992 it's a free plugin.

@alsomar said in [Plugin] QuadFaceTools:

other software such as Substance Painter or RizomUV may struggle to handle these duplicates correctly

Hi Alejandro, I have no problem at all in Substance with QFT obj files (I can even bake hipoly objs into low poly objs with no issue).

BTW it's a known problem and has been there forever.
There's also a problem with unwelded UV islands (the UV are in the right places but actually each quad has cuts/seams at all edges).

I shared a few info and workarounds about this problem years ago, but unfortunately Thom is really busy and apparently doesn't have time to fix it for now, so we still have to use workarounds.

https://community.sketchucation.com/topic/129714/plugin-quadfacetools/634

The workaround in 3dsMax I mentioned in that post is outdated.
Now I just filter the selection for polygons with 3 sides (in the selection tab) and erase all of them.
In some cases I also export from QFT to Blender and then export an FBX to 3dsMax.

@Rich-O-Brien
That's fine, I was just wondering if any important stuff in messages could be lost.
I can wait for sure..
By the way this works pretty nice on the 4,5" screen of my phone.
The old forum was almost unusable.

@Rich-O-Brien said in NEW Forum Software Issues:

Its been a huge undertaking to get the old content into this newer system.

Wow, really promising so far..
I wonder if beta forum and old private messages will be retrieved later on or if they are lost..

@duanekemp said:

not a solution for "on purpose" projects.

A couple of weeks ago, while I was modeling that compost turning machine you probably saw on sketchup facebook page, a friend came out with one of those "magic" AI modeling website..
He prompted the robot to produce "A square sofa pillow with white and red stripes" to put it in a rendering.
The robot proposed 4 different (half decent) pillows and he was like "You see? You can use this stuff for actual work".

So I was curious to test it for my "actual work" and prompted in more or less the following (which were the exact requirements for my animated model) just to see to what extent it could be "useful":

I need a self-propelled compost heap turning machine, about 3 meters tall and 4 meters wide.
It should consist of 3 draw calls, the first one for the main body, the second one for the animated tracks and the third one for the animated roller.
The main material should be orange paint with compost splats coming from below and the "AMIU Puglia S.p.a" logo on the back of the cabin.
The textures should be packed for Unity HDRP metallic-smoothness PBR shader.
I need the UV chart to be split in 2 different UDIM tiles, a 4k set for the main body and a 2k set for the animated parts.
It should be rigged to follow a spline and I need constraints on the tracks and the roller in order to follow accordingly whenever the model animates along the spline

The robot proposed 4 different machines similar to a coffee grinder (static models, with only base color map, about 1m x 1m x 1m large, with no tracks or roller whatsoever).
Two were blue and two were green.
None of them was at least orange.

So yeah.. that's it

@jo-ke said:

The light is often better in diffusion.

Yeah, in those few cases in which the sun isn't casting shadows in 4 different directions, maybe..

Now, that's a massive model

@rich o brien said:

I have them as shortcut keys. If I want to TRIM I just copy the cutter to memory buffer before the boolean. CTRL+V will bring it back.

That's the key point.. I'm a "toolbar man" can't remember that many button, I have really bad memory.
But I have custom toolbars set up, so I can keep a compact group of just 3 buttons: add, group-add and split (from BoolTools2).
I always feel that split is the most versatile "subtractive" boolean.
Your point about trim is valid, but what if you need intersect?
Split may serve as subtract, intersect and trim and takes a single button on my toolbars.

But.. probably the real reason why I prefer Split is that, for the kind of models I mainly do for work, I barely use booleans. They tend to create unsuitable topology..
I use booleans mostly when I do hobby projects to build something out of wood.
I don't want to waste wood, so with Split I can more easily keep track of the leftovers and scraps to do this kind of stuff.

@Rich The text in your example is pure genius

I know this was already solved, but I would say that in this kind of situation (when you already have the 2 objects) I usually prefer to use Split.. so you don't have to draw the cutters just for the sake of doing the boolean and you end up with less total clicks.
Nobody loves Split.. I do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNbAMU0FVZs

@mike amos said:

It looks as though rendering is going through a once a decade shift, so many ?AI? render sites/programs etc are coming on stream so the next basic toolset might just include a bluddy dictionary........

How many old stle render resources will still be here within the next two years? Twilight is gone now and others like Maxwell have glacial development lead times while the current ethos appears to be constant change.

This is one of the main reason why I'm more and more specializing in very specific stuff, detailed/animated objects, custom shapes and textures, optimized models for VR/AR/realtime/web, teaching 3d for VR developers and all this kind of technical-oriented stuff.
Where i live the "classic" render market is already bloated with people working fast, but at really bad quality and underwaged, possibly cracking software and avoiding taxes in most cases.
So i think AI will make not a big difference for me (at least in the next few years), right now is a problem of those sloppy "collegues".
I'm done with that market, their analog stupidity has already screwed that well before AI was even a thing.
The only option I found to survive is doing those "hard" stuff that they can't or want not learn to do.. I hardly recall the last time I did a "classic" architectural still render

@dave r said:

Share the file so we can see what you've got going on.

Not necessary to upload the file, the screenshot clearly reveals that problem was between chair and keyboard.
Flowify requires you to select BOTH the component and the flowify rig at the same time before you run the command.
The guy has only the rig selected and not the stair component, so that the plugin doesn't work and of course ask for additional "input" (the beloved component).

@rich o brien said:

But how does SU read UDIMs? Separate maps? I know I read about this before with some other model you did but can't remember the workflow.

I did a quick recap in the thread about the Ferrari F2004, which was actually a pretty complex model.
Here's an extended overview of the full process I use to prepare the model for the cuts, the packing of the tiles and the final reload (including some tricks for unfolding flat strip throwing in a bit of Thrupaint and also to create an ID map straight in Sketchup). I'not sure which is the worst, if my english or my michrophone, but I hope it's itellegible enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEhCDNZnvw0

@rich o brien said:

These are hurdles you begin encounter at higher frequencies when you push the boundaries of what SketchUp was primarily meant to do.

I push those freakin boundaries every day all day long and rarely face problems.
The secred is: good topology & good practices

@cmeed said:

my personal buttons I've created, have stopped working

I posted a workaround a few pages before

https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=73776&start=270#p687744

@brittbliss said:

1. Must be a solid

Not really. It doesn't need to be solid, it simply has to be clean.
You just want to avoid, small triangles, folded triangles, intersecting geometry, ngons.

If you want to get serious into unwrap, regardless the app you use, I'd reccomended to practice with modeling and topology, to better understand what's goin'on in your model.
It's a bit harder to grasp if you can't model that kind of stuff yourself.

@studiospectre said:

Unfortunately my menu bar is still completely gone
I think I'll finally upgrade from 21 to 23

Naa.. It works fine in 2021 (tbh it works way better than it does on 2023 due to the 23 UI limitation).
You probably messed up the install.

Make sure to download and install this:

https://sketchucation.com/plugin/903-libfredo6

THEN download and install this:

https://sketchucation.com/plugin/2430-lordofthetoolbars

Reboot Sketchup and you toolbars will show up again.

Thank you so much, Fredo!

@awadrummer said:

Am I missing something? I out of nowhere started receiving the error message "This version of LordOfTheToolbars (2.5a) has expired Please upgrade to the latest version", I haven't upgraded Sketchup. I tried uninstalling and re-installing the plugin. I've tried updating the Sketchucation extension. I can't get this message to go away or get my custom toolbars back. Was there an update that wasn't posted to the site? Is there any way I can diagnose and resolve this issue?

I have the exact same problem.
I basically cant't use Sketchup without LOTT, I rebuilt my whole Sketchup interface with custom toolbar and palettes.
I hope Fredo can fix this quickly.