How would you make the parts of the imported model into Revit components? Is it just a matter of 'tracing' over the object, or can you literally take a roof plane from your SU model and turn it into a Revit roof object?

Can any tell me their experiences with using SU models for conceptual design and then sending them to Revit? Also, has anyone take a Revit model exported to DWG and work in SU with it?

I know this topic has probably been discuss a few thousand times, but I want to start this thread regarding specifically importing SKP into MAX and using Vray for rendering. There is a lot of chatter on other rendering forum sites that pro viz guys say that SU bascially sucks and shouldn't be used at all for modeling. I disagree, very much, and I wanted to know what people thought about the workflow from SU to 3D Studio.

I am currently using Vray for SketchUp and it's a fantastic toolset, but I feel like I am missing out on a lot of resources (64 bit environment, proxies, faster rendering times) by not heading into 3D Studio to perform the rendering. Can you guys share your experiences, good and bad, so that I can pull the trigger on this?

Thanks Brody. I think I accomplished what I needed. I saved out the site as a component, so I could open alone and focus on it. I made the ground plane a single texure and used a few Photoshop tricks to get areas of grass, gravel, and dry leaves. Then I made several tree face me components and used a few plants, shrubs, and grasses from FormFonts in combo with the compo sprayer. The site file is about 50MB - so she is a beast, but it looks pretty darn good. I'll post a pic in a few.

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?