Offline
@rv1974 said:
hmm its strange why TT turned off this icon
As far as I remenber, this was intentional, because that's a bit of a beta/buggy tools and you should "use at your own risk".
However, I have to say that I use it a lot as it is and that works perfect in 95% of cases for me.
Here we go.. My best attempt to explain it.
The basic concept is that you export from a single-material model and then reload in another model with two separate materials. 
@rv1974 said:
@panixia I saw offset loop icon in your video. How did you get it?
P.S. Too bad it doesn't respect VCB inputs
The icon is available in the plugin icon folder, and the tool itself is still present in the sub-menu of quadface tools, but it's turned off from the toolbar in the current build.
I built that button myself using the "Toolbar Editor" plugin and the existing icon.
Same for the "convert to plain mesh button", and tons of other custom buttons I created for other stuff.
Sometimes I create the icons for them, sometimes I borrow from other plugins and/or modify them.
@rich o brien said:
In some type of snazzy DIY dynamic pie menu
Well, I'm a bit of a toolbar-guy because I never used other apps with those pie-style menus..
but I know a bunch of people using similar stuff in Maya and such and they told me that is very handy.
Is that a beta plugin? Never seen it before..
Do you remember the quarantine Ferrari-WIP? 
Posted some progress here:
@rich o brien said:
Grazie amico mio
Your Italian is 100% spot-on 
I was just thinking about you recently because I wanted to share with you some tricks I fine-tuned based on your old wrap-r/substance tutorial as a starting point.
I shared a first insight of the workflow in this post.
https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=73991
@rich o brien said:
this hidden tool of QuadFace Tools...
...which I think holds the record for the 2nd deepest plugin menu entry in the world...
Agreed. Thomas should bury it a couple of nesting levels deeper, so that nobody aside us know about it. 
Meanwhile I created myself a button for it using ToolbarEditor.
Of course I chose the Pollo icon to celebrate the R&D stage
Here is the icon itself, in case Thom wants to include that toolbar button in future relases
Here in this video is a first mockup/proof-of-concept for some animation I started to put toghther during lockdown.
Now that I'm done with the car I will reload it and continue to work on the scenes..
Stay tuned for more updates in the summer. 
Finally I exported the model to 3dsMax using QFT obj exporter to render it in Vray, and imported as straight .skp into Unity3d where I plan to do animations and interactive stuff.
I then exported a GLTF from Unity and imported in Blender just to convert it in binary GLB which is more compact and convenient.
Below is a screnshot from Unity inspector:
Here's a short video of the first export/rendering test with Substance PBR textures reloaded (order of appearence in the YouTube description).
Each texture set have different resolution and optional channels (like opacity, emissive, AO) depending on what is needed.
Some view from Substance Painter including the full car and a little texture-set breakdown.
Notice the double UDIM tile on the body, rejoined with the aero props and brake calipers with no wasted space.
During pandemic I choose to put togheter this humble tribute to one of the best racing car ever, as a pastime while I were forced to stay at home even in my spare time and weekends.
Here's my entry for the infamous Ferrari F-2004 one of the most dominant and best looking formula one car which ever hit the tracks.
100% of the modeling and UV's are done in Sketchup Pro 2020 + Quadface Tools + VertexTools2 + Sub-D + SplitTools + JointPushPull alongside other plugins.
I did the UV unwrapping using the Wrap-r plugin.
I only did the texturing outside of sketchup using Substance for direct texture painting and Photoshop to create all the decals/logo stuff.
I hope you enjoy it.
@ramonbastos said:
Hello! I noticed that when I use SubD, it creates some polygons that are not really necessary, making the file bigger. You can see in the example below:
[attachment=1:155faezl]<!-- ia1 -->panela 01.png<!-- ia1 -->[/attachment:155faezl]
[attachment=0:155faezl]<!-- ia0 -->Screenshot_53.png<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:155faezl]
I tried using TT's cleanup, looks like it removes some "random" lines. Of course its not random, but it leaves a lot of lines that I can erase and keep the same geometry.
Any tips on how to optimize it?
The proper way to remove those quads triangulations when it is possible (for those quads which are coplanar, that's why you can erase them) would be, after you are done with modeling, to convert the mesh into "plain mesh" and then select all and run the "remove triangulation" command from QuadFaceTools.
Please notice that you are visually erasing those triangulation at Sketchup interface level, but at "machine level" those triangles are still present, so the model will not perform any better in any render engine or game engine, because stuff need to be triangulated in GPU.
What actually matters in therms of model performances are mainly the amount of vertices, the number of drawcalls, the size/compression of the textures, good UV's (if you have too many UV-islands the machine will see much more vertices than you see in the viewport).
Actually I tend to keep those triangles, because they make for proper exporting files.
If you don't triangulate, many external formats/engines/applications will triangulate them in some automated way and you can get weird results, in particular smoothing/texturing artifacts.
If you are into unwrapping/game engine stuff, like I am, you have to love those triangulations and want to have full control over them, instead of having some weird algorithm doing unpredictable stuff in background.
Nice work as ever.
And most of all, it's great to see you back here, Rich.
