Any tricks at making a rich lush forest in SU? I am currently thinking of using the compo sprayer and a bunch of face-me's to save on geometry load. I am looking to get something like you would see out of Vue, like Artur Rosa's work in this gallery http://www.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/?page=8#

It seems to only do this with some models and not all across the board. Example - I just tried to recreate it in the model I am currently working on and it was fine. Did just as you said, no shadows and at my cursor. Then I started a brand new clean file and tried to import the same component (FF_Model_ID13477_4_LPWAD_23) and it turned shads on and zoomed right into the origin. Its crazy!
When it happens its a huge pain. It happens with 3D People components from FormFonts. I'll use my components window, navigate to my libray of 3D people, pick the model I want to insert, SU locks up for a sec, turns shadows on, then zooms extents and puts the thing at the origin.

When I insert a component (usually FormFonts models) they turn on shadows and automatically place the component at the origin. Its a huge pain on large models, esp when I am at the final stages and adding entourage. How can you stop SU from doing this automatically?

The latest build 1.49.01 will not let vray materials come over with a component if you copy or import the file in. So you are hosed even if you found a resource, which I have not yet found one. Flyingarchiecture.com has some good stuff, but it's modeled for Rhino w Vray, but they share the same material files and I believe he has 3DS files of his models, so you could import them into SU and reapply the materials.

You guys rock. Is there anything that hasn't been thought of for this program? Gotta love SketchUp!

This may already exist, well it kinda does, but I would like to make a request to the Ruby Pros out there. I would love to have a simple plugin that simply lets you click a line or object and turns that objects layer off. This is something I wish I had every time I import a CAD file and would like to just turn of a series of layers quickly. This would be similar to AutoCAD's express tools function. Now I found the plugin Layer Manager v6 , but it doesnt seem to work on SU 8 Pro. Maybe someone could even fix this plug-in http://rhin.crai.archi.fr/rld/plugin_details.php?id=217

My experience is that HQ renders take a long time to cook. Vue does not give you free render nodes if you wanted to distribute rendering to other computers. Vray does allow you to render on up to 10 machines for no extra cost. I guess it depends on how much of work is landscape related. If you are mainly rendering interior and exterior architecture, my personal advice is that Vray is the best plugin for this.

Did that layer get turned off by your first scene settings? I know an obvious answer, but sometimes its little things like this that you overlook.

What ever happened with Moxi? I Googled it but found nothing.

Would anyone like to share their presets file? There used to be one with a few settings and I just unstalled the latest and now its empty!

Definately change the sun size to 1 for starters. This is under your Environment tab, then click the M next to GI Color, then change the Size under General.

Next, I would enable Ambient Occulsion (under Indirect Illum)check on and set the amount to .5 and maybe a radius of 8.0. This will help add punch and detail to those nooks.

Attached a sample rendering of how it came out

I solved my own problem! So, when you are working with smaller objects like a wine bottle, you need to set the color value for the fog to a higher value like 10-12. I was using 1.0 because it worked when the bottle was 8 feet tall, but when I scaled it down to real world dimensions, the value of 1 was rendering the glass clear.

I apologize, I might not have been clear. I was referring to rendering in Vray. The glass material in Vray is not rendering as realistic colored glass. Im sure its a bug in the latest release. Just wanted to see if other people are having this issue.

I am rendering a wine bottle with a green glass material from the Vr4SU site, and earlier I was able to get the glass to render green (using fog color) and then myseriously, it stopped working now all I get is clear glass. I have pretty much tried everything from checking my face orientation to ungrouping to deleting and reimporting the material to using a different material and none of them are working. Am I missing something???

Do you need to uninstall and reinstall if you are using 64bit Windows? The older 8.0 is installed in the x86 Program Files. Will this prevent SU from using 64 bit?

I have this same issue in 7.1. I have a 110MB file with a lot of PNG face-me landscape and its also around 40 scenes. It will not animate and just crashes. I took the file home to my personal computer that has 64 bit Vista and 8GM of RAM (not sure if sketchup even cares about that considering its 32-bit) but it exports the animations with no crashes on 7.1. I contacted SU Support but they didnt really tell me it was a known issue they were fixing. They told me to reduce the size of the model or I could try using 7.0 again to see if that works. Not really the answer I was looking for. SU is a great, no, **really **great quick modeling program. It is by no means a great animation package though. I'm getting to the point where I have to look at some other software to do animation and rendering as part of my workflow. I have pushed SU to its limits I'm afraid.

Any new developments with this? I saw that there was a new Pro 7 release last week but was disappointed to see that this issue was not addressed. I use large textures as base plans all the time and the biggest complaint I get is that they look "muddy" and the quality is too pixilated. Is there no quick fix for this problem with OpenGL?