@unknownuser said:

You can use the Tape Measure tool for this. See insructions here http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=95006

Keep in mind that this will scale in all directions though. If you've extruded objects in your model to a the correct height, they will be scaled along with the horizontal geometry.

Is it possible to do this for a selection and not the entire model?

I typically start out all my projects in AutoCAD from a survey then take them into sketchup once all the major stuff is drawn in accurately where I design and model. Somehow early on in the project the entire sketchup model got slightly out of scale and became like 5% bigger than the original plan I had imported and I caught it when I brought the model back into CAD to dimension a site plan.

Now I am trying to fix the model and adjust the scale of everything but there is no good scale tool I have found. Is there any scale tool plugin that works like the AutoCAD scale tool? Basically I want to select a reference length, then select the new correct length like how the autocad tool works.

Now that I'm writing this and thinking I actually might have found a solution by doing some simple math and inputting the percentage but it would still be nice if I could find a scale plugin that worked like this. Thanks for the help.

Get the instant roof plugin here

http://www.valiarchitects.com/sketchup_scripts/instant-roof

I'm pretty sure you can create your own component tile styles and modify it. If not directly I'm sure there is a workaround to be able to use that plugin with custom tiles by replacing some of the components. If you can't do it inside the plugin itself, then just create 3d tiles or whatever and then select instances and replace them- it's still an amazing plugin to build roofs.

If this doesn't exist I would love a ruby plugin that offered a command line where you could type commands for every shortcut you need. You would be able to assign commands as if they were shortcuts for everything you need. Working this way is much more natural for me and every time I work in cad and go back to sketchup I find myself instinctively trying to give sketchup commands, so I'm thinking how great it would be if you could actually do that.

Are there more tree libraries available for it from anywhere?

I just cleaned up some toolbars I don't use.... I have a bunch of plugins that don't have toolbars that I really wish did though.

It is very very fast. I'm not 100 percent sure but I know overall my system was using close to 5gb with just SU and Podium 64 running. It really takes advantages of as many CPU threads as possible, It is still going to be limited by SU in terms of geometry it can handle and I tried rendering a scene that had over 1 million polys worth of 3d plants and it just couldn't handle it which isn't a big deal I just replaced one component with a 2d plant and it dropped the model down 90% and rendered quick. For a quick one click in SU solution it is pretty good. I'm getting into Thea for more complex stuff.

@unknownuser said:

I'd vote against a lot of restrictions and such. I think the only restriction should be some method of making sure that whatever is warehoused would be quality content. Whether that means someone actually approving each model or simply only letting registered sketchucation users UPLOAD models.

I think when you put limitations like ratios, it promotes more models of lesser quality. For example, if I run into a limit and want to download a bench, I'm not going to spend an hour modeling a nice piece of furniture. I'm more liable to pull out a second rate model and throw it up there in order to download my bench.

And as was mentioned restricting downloads in other ways can just create a hassle. I ended up never really going to pushpullbar because I could never figure out what I was supposed to do. I got registered and made some posts but I would find someone sharing models which I couldn't download and other things. It just becomes annoying and I didn't have the time or inclination to try and figure out the rules.

-Brodie

exactly. I think by nature it being sketchucation would make quality high and people would rate them. We could have moderator review models and have low quality ones removed. As soon as you put ratios, download limits, subcription fees, whatever it will never grow enough to be useful.

It depends on the rendering program, some are 64 bit. And doing it that way wouldn't make sense because the big thing with rendering is CPU, so if you tried rendering two scenes at a time hey would each get half the CPU speed and be twice as slow.

I was looking at the task manager while rendering a project in SU Podium 64 bit this morning and it used 97-100% CPU with all 8 threads being maxed out. It showed my total system memory peak at 4.5gb out of 8gb ram used while rendering.

So even if you could utilize more ram, you can't double up processor speed so it wouldn't make any difference....

@earthmover said:

I definitely like the idea of the Sketchucation Model Repository.

How about a ratio system. You need to maintain a certain give and take ratio in order to have downloading access to models. You have to give one for every two you take or something. Also a mandatory rating system. If you haven't rated your previous download, you temporarily lose downloading privileges until you add the rating. If a model gets more than 10 minimum ratings, then it's removed.

I think giving a lot of requirements would be prohibitive. I think by nature that it would be from the sketchucation community would weed out most of the crap and encourage people to share. I don't think a ratio system or restrictions should be in place. Maybe have a one-time mandatory upload before you can download anything and get access? So every user would have to upload a quality model and have it get approved before gaining access to download anything.

It seems like the 3D warehouse hasn't grown much since I first started using sketchup like 7 years ago, or at least nearly as much as it used to. With the sheer number of sketchup users producing models the content of the 3d warehouse seems a little disproportionate. I'm always checking it for basic building materials and it seems like the selection is pitiful and I rarely find anything useful. Why do you think that is and can we make a push to expand it and remind people to share models?

@solo said:

I can convert them

I promise not to save anything....

Haha and how would you do that? If you're serious I might have to send some your way... I would like to know how to do it myself though too.

@pixero said:

As far as I know you must have Vray for 3dsmax installed to see Vray materials. Otherwise everything will be black.
If you have Max you can install the Vray demo (30 days) and convert to other renderer. There are some maxscripts that do that.

Yeah I installed vray and I can see the textures in max and render the scenes in vray. I don't know how to convert the materials to thea though. There was a materials converter I tried a few times in max (i'm not sure if it came with max 2012, thea2max, or vray...) and I ran the converter and it would convert like one material and change everything else to gray. For example it would convert the trunks of the trees and leave all the foliage gray. Is there another plugin or program I can try?

I posted this on the thea forum but my posts have to be approved for some reason...

I have a bunch of evermotion plants in .max format textured for vray. I want to be able to insert these into thea with textures. I don't know anything about 3ds max and just installed it to do conversions at this point (learning it is another project). I try exporting the models to thea but they come into thea without textures. I try using the material converter and it converted one material and changed everything else to gray.

How can I convert these models for use in thea and get most of the textures to work?

This is one thing I haven't gotten the hang of or found decent models of. I have yet to find any really good usable hedges. Anyone have any to share?

Sweet. Ok so just curious, aside from the interactive piece what can Thea do that other rendering engines can't, what can Thea do better than other top engines, and what does something like vray have going for it over thea?

@solo said:

@unknownuser said:

I think I'm going to go buy a bunch of evermotion and xfrog plants now. Will I have to tweak their materials much in thea?

I'll tell you what, I'm gonna render my Airstream trailer tomorrow, I'll add an Evermotion tree so you can see how it works.

As for polys vs render speed, I have never seen a slow down based on poly's I rendered the above scene in 22 minutes (20 million polys, Xfrog trees)

Grass can be added as a texture with bump, displacement or scattered (painted) as grass objects as your heart and ram desires.
There are many free grass solutions on the Thea forums as well as a whole lot of great materials.

Once you get going with Thea and know what you are doing, you will not want to touch anything with less bells and whistles.

OT: the next release will have a whole lot of cool features (I cannot discuss right now) and the speed will be 2x faster, and it already is fast.

Awesome, I appreciate it. So polys don't have a huge speed impact in thea? I guess I'm used to render engines based in sketchup where the large models cripple the render speed. If I don't use podium much it's no big deal since I had an upgrade for $49 from a past student version I had. 2x faster speed will be great. Now is the interactive render GPU based or is anything GPU enhanced? I have a decent 1gb video card, 3.4ghz i7 quad core, and 8gb ram so I'm hoping thea will really take advantage of my pc nicely. It would be amazing if they built a render engine that used both GPU and CPU at the same time.

oh wow this is cool

I still just bought podium v2 since it is more useful for most of the small projects I do but thea is going to be a great tool to get some jaw dropping renders on our bigger commercial projects with high poly plants.

I think I'm going to go buy a bunch of evermotion and xfrog plants now. Will I have to tweak their materials much in thea? I know evermotion has stuff preconfigured for vray, will I have to tweak much or will they work just dropped into a thea scene?

How do number of polys correspond to render time? Will lots of plants significantly slow down render time or can I expect to still get reasonable speeds? Now let's say I build all my hardscape stuff in sketchup then import to thea and insert my plants and edit materials. What about 3D grass, what's the best way to apply 3D grass to a whole surfaces and where can I get some good models of 3D grass to use? I know I have a lot of questions but thea is really exciting and I want to jump in and be able to show off so I can convince my work to buy it!

is there any plugin that lets you easily create and manage your own toolbar? Basically I'm looking for a toolbar where I can define a custom button to a shortcut on another plugin. I have tons and tons of ruby scripts and I would like to be able to map some functions to a toolbar since most of them don't have toolbars of their own. It would be cool if you could load a custom icon then define that button to a function and maybe be able to manage multiple custom defined toolbars.

@unknownuser said:

Does your mouse not have a middle mouse button?

It does, I just set it up like this when I first was learning sketchup and I can't go back. Center clicking to orbit feels awkward for me, my middle finger is glued to W and now it feels really natural to go between W and A to toggle between pan and orbit and zoom through models. It's faster for me like this because then I keep my mouse fingers glued on the left and right click buttons. Things get weird for a minute after I've been in sketchup all day and have to go into autocad and try to navigate the same way...

I know it sounds strange and I know you can navigate other ways, I think I was playing a lot of counterstrike when I was learning sketchup or something and using sketchup any other way feels uncomfortable now.