I think developing sketchup in different directions might be interesting!
The fact that sketchup is still the 3D modeller of choice for many experienced modellers probably has more to do with all the great plugins around here than with the last upgrades we've seen.
The evolution of sketchup in the last years has been slow and not always successful (dynamic components anyone?)

My enthousiasm for this acquisition might have to do with Trimble's expertise in laserscanning as well. The holy grail of surveying in architecture would be an automated process from laserscan to a textured 3D model. If this would be possible with sketchup, I'ld be delighted!

So good luck guys, I hope you get all the freedom and support you need to take sketchup in new directions!

Thanks a lot for all the advice, I'll stick with nvidia then!

Solo, this is the laptop card, it's a dedicated one: NVIDIA GeForce GTX560M 1.5Gb GDDR5, PhysX + CUDA ready

It's a BTO laptop (dutch, sorry). I was doubting between this and the Radeon 6990m. But when looking again at their site, it seems they have removed the GTX560m option! Now I can only choose between the Radeon and the GTX580m which is really expensive..

Or take the cheaper P-book with the GT555 (no cuda, does have optimus, which is good for battery life.

Buggers, I thought the choice was made...

Solo,
I don't want to hijack this thread, but can you elaborate a bit on the nvidia vs AMD idea?

I'm in the market for a laptop based on a clevo barebone and I have the choice between the Geforce 560M (3Dmark06 15000) and AMD 6990M (23000). Nvidia was my obvious choice at first, but when I started looking for the advantages of CUDA I started doubting. Some minor accelerations in adobe CS5 for supported CPUs (slower or way more expensive quadros), CPU rendering in Octane (which I don't use).

For the rest I have the impression most software developers support both AMD & Nvidia. OpenCL seems the way to go, although it's not clear how well it will work and how widely it will be adopted. I hope CS6 will be OpenCL and not CUDA accelerated, but that's not clear yet.

So any other good reasons to go for the slower and cheaper 560m?

The % reduction seems to work great. File size went from 18mb to 10mb and quality is still quite ok.

But when I tried the 20pix/meter option I got different results. I posted a cropped screenshot of before and after the reduction. As you can see the right facade remains unaltered, while the new one and the left neighbour are reduced a lot.

I've used 'make unique texture' on some of these, maybe that's the problem?

BTW, this could work very well with "Component edit window". You select a component, open in another window, change texture size and bring it back. Like that you have control over the different parts of your project.

Simply amazing! I was just going to look up a way to reduce texture sizes on a 18MB SU project. I open Sketchucation and this is the first thread of the bunch

Thanks for this, I'll give it a go and let you know how it turns out!

Another question re: SU and Win 7 64bit:

32bit apps can only use 2GB at a time. But if I have multiple instances of SU open, will they all have their own 2GB of RAM allocated?
I'm planning on buying an i7 quad laptop with 8 or 16 GB of RAM, so would be interested to know this before I buy.

Found this, but is says that the principal does not apply to older software. And as SU is not always state-of-the-art in terms of resource use, I'ld just like to know for sure..
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/145160-whatis-mem-use-multiple-instances-same-32bit-program-win7-64bit.html

Thanks!

I've just tested the plugin on SU8 (win7 32bit) and it only works for groups, not components - the new SU window just doesn't load.
Any suggestions?

Nice and easy!

There's a good way to automate the process if you want to make a lot of those images. And if you have photoshop & bridge. Make three scenes with style settings as described. Include these three in the animation. For every camera scene, export those three style scenes (in an animation without transitions).

In bridge, select the three images, go to Tools>photoshop>Open files into photoshop layers. Make an action for the blurring and blending of the layers and save. Now you just have to repeat this action on the next series of images.

@unknownuser said:

okay . .. what's the catch?

Here's what they say on their site:

How could this be? How can StudioGPU offer such a valuable piece of software at no cost? Let us briefly explain how we can do it. We firmly believe that MachStudio Pro is a revolutionary piece of software that will completely transform the way that you work in 3D by saving you both time and money. Based on our confidence in this notion, we think we can create a viable business model from generating revenue from Support, Training and Consulting Services. Please help us change the 3D production world for the better. Take a spin on MachStudio Pro today. You won't be sorry.

Sounds reasonable. A good free product will probably get hundreds of times more users than a 4000$ one in a market flooded with visualisation solutions. So if they get 20 or 30$ on average through selling extra services, textures, training, ... they might make more money out of it.

Anyone tried it yet?

@matte said:

I didn't notice anyone mention shaderlight? I played with it only breifly and thought it might have promise, but I do not yet know much about the rendering game yet. What do you more experienced rendering folk think of it?

I've played with both Shaderlight and Twilight. IMO Shaderlight was too limited. The realtime preview is a plus. But on all other areas, Twilight wins I think. The fact that you cannot use your own bumpmaps is a big downside to shaderlight. That might change in the future, but for now it is too limited to grow into I think.
With Twilight you can make more progress over time. And if you've reached the limits, you can add kerkythea or thea.
I have bought Thea just before the price went up, and I'm planning to buy twilight soon. I thinks I'll use twilight most of the time. But with the quality materials over there on the Thea forum, I should really expand my (yet to be explored...) rendering skills to thea asap.