This is a great plugin Morisdov. My request would be avi. animation export however. I want rendering engines to recognise these movements for rendering animations. But again, thanks

@marian said:

Thank you Prince dragon cok(? ) for enlightening us....no wonder i couldn't get it right.
But i do have a question ...when aplying the material/texture you must apply it by selecting the group or just editing the group and adding the material on the faces directly?

Your welcome Marian. I'm pretty sure you edit the group, then apply your texture - create a linked material, and then close the group. If it works please post some examples here

Hmm, I didn't really mean to run away from this thread. I've just moved house recently and so didn't have time. Let me just go over a few points quickly.

1. As nomeradona said all elements to be displaced should be grouped (it doesn't say this in the manual I think)

2. Find the texture you want to displace and apply it to the object you want to texture.

3. Open photoshop and create a 'greyscale' version of the original coloured texture you applied in sketchup.

4. Create a v-ray linked material based on the coloured texture you want to displace.

5. Under maps in your material editor check the displacement box and then click on the small 'm' beside displacement.

6. Once in the displacement screen look under 'common' then 'type' and select 'bitmap'

7. To your right hand side a bitmap editor will appear - click on the small 'm' button under 'file'.

8. This is where you link the greyscale image you created earlier.

9. Under the preview screen in displacement you can change the intensity of displacement by playing with the 'multiplier'.

10. Remember vray reads white as height and black as depth.

11. Render

@remus said:

Well im impressed. How long did it take to render?

I don't know the exact time but it was around the two hour mark with 2 cores running. I think that's pretty fast

@unknownuser said:

Wow that looks really good!

How can you create such a model? Do you have a tutorial?

Here's a link to the model (if that's what your looking for). Regarding displacement I used the vray manual
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=c720f689aca3213ec7847d940e6d60cd&ct=mdrm&prevstart=0

Just started using v-ray and I'm converted. I created a greyscale copy of a grass texture I found on cgtextures and played around with the multiplier settings getting varying results in vray. I found the model hand on the warehouse - surprisingly it was created entirely in sketchup as every element is a component. The resulting image is biebelesque to say the least

Displacement

No displacement

lots of displacement

Fantastic, nice detail, great imagination. Looking forward to seeing your animation!

Your examples are highly convincing solo. I'm all support for a displacement ruby. It seems you already have it however.. how did you create those models?

I like this

robot

disguised building very much.

Keep it up

Prince 'dragon' of cok

Fantastic, well done!

Cool, well good luck with it. There is also some discussion regarding E+ going on at pushpullbar.com under the sketchup section I believe. Have a look

@unknownuser said:

I have heard from others that Ecotect is difficult to use and that it and the SU plugin are alone on the forefront of the energysim movement going on. Like I said, I am new to this whole thing so I am just now being immersed in the issue whereas I imagine most people who are fiddling with the newest projects have extensive knowledge in the field. That being said, I feel like we are humorously behind on having user-friendly technology to run 3D simulations of this kind. Let's just get real, energy efficiency is by no means a new concept, yet the fact that this buggy SU plugin is now considered to be the current benchmark just goes to show us that we have put ourselves in this sticky situation.

All over the internet in forums such as this one people are talking about how more and more companies are going 3D and going green, either because they are sensible or because legislatures are being sensible. Meanwhile, I am wondering why we did not jump on that wagon at the turn of the millennium! As of right now I do not have the programming knowledge to create something like a finished version of the SU plugin; however, I do have a good grip on what computers are immediately capable of and I fail to see why it is so difficult to put something together with nails rather than tape. Like I said before, I think that we are playing catch up right now--it's not that it's immensely difficult to make a user-friendly sim, it's that noone had the foresight to make it happen sooner. I know I sound awfully critical for not having the know-how and not even having the know-of until recently, but I truly think that had enough people been told/allowed to put their heads together we would already have DoE-endorsed software and this country could be a lot more proactive concerning energy efficiency.

Well said. It really seems to be a specialist area however, I can't see how it can be easily simplified. I'm really not the person to comment on what route should be taken, the furthest I ever got in ecotect was finding out how energy efficient a glass box with louvers was. User friendly to me would be; a simple way to apply multiple material properties to a face in sketchup (pretty much just some way to set numerous u-values to one face), also an easy way to implement desired inside and outside temperatures, maybe some way simulate heat emmiters like radiators, and some way to 'zone' different rooms/spaces for individual evaluation...
Anyway I'd have a look at ecotect if I were you. Also, if energyplus is to go anywhere it really needs a user manual. But anyway, if it is possible simplify or make the existing energyplus plugin understandable that would be greatly appreciated.

Certainly not user friendly or easy to grasp. Caused my sketchup toolbar to display loads of icons I didn't want at startup. Very frustrating, ended up deleting it. A potentially very useful plugin however, but needs to be way easier to use (No manual at all afaik!!). Then again maybe these environmental simulation programs are just inherently difficult - I remember doing ecotect in uni this yr, not fun at all

Are you a mac user? Maybe you need to upgrade your flash??

This doesn't seem to work actually. I can play the embedded link from the skp uploaded here, but when I try to embed my own, a blank screen pops up with the url address.
I'm on a pc btw

Hold on I got it to work fine - make sure you 'embed' it though

This works fine for me, unfortunately it is not truely embedded like TBD's Video Textures for SketchUp. Still though, pretty useful - who made this?
I use firefox btw - doesn't seem to make a difference though

Hey TBD, is your video texture ruby open source? If so where can I get it? I saw your youtube vid - it has huge potential imo

Really really excellent, thank you very much

sounds about right, it's an imported 3ds tree. Getting rid of it corrects my shadow problems, but podium still won't render shadows however.. Thanks for the reply

Eh for some reason sketchup is displaying shadow rays.. Shadows are also not showing up in podium when I render as well plz help