Hey thanks for this plugin Fredo. It's by far my favorite surface generating plugin. Great work.

I'll give Thea a try next.

Right now I'm trying out the Keyshot demo and I have to say that it's one of the best programs I've ever used. It does exactly what it's supposed to and it does it extremely well. Absurdly easy to use and the results are true professional quality. The texture/material library makes everything ready to go and editing is quick and easy. But it is expensive and it's not versatile. It's made for product rendering and that's pretty much it. Not to say that you couldn't use it for other things, but it's a very focused program with results that speak for itself. I won't be able to get this anytime soon, but I'm putting it on my "to buy" list.

The only renderer I've tried with Sketchup is SUPodium, which seems fine for a lot of material types, but it's default base shader seems like a sort of matte blinn material or something, but whatever it is it doesn't work too well for a shiny plastics or as glossy paint like car paint.

I haven't tried V-Ray yet, but I've seen a lot of talk about it, so I guess that's next on my list of tryouts. I was just hoping to find something I could use for less than $400, but that might just be an impossibility.

Keyshot looks stellar! About a month ago I was talking to a friend of mine who mentioned this but I never followed up on it, so I'm glad you brought it up. If only it wasn't $1000, but maybe sometime. I actually can't wait to play around with the demo.

In school I did a fair amount of modelling and rendering using Maya, and while Maya is very powerful and versatile, it's expensive, stiff, and rather obtuse in the way it's organized as a program and it's methods.

When I've looked at the various plugins and renderers featured and advertised here at Sketchucation, or in Catchup and various other sites they usually use architectural or interior design examples, which makes sense, but what do you guys think works best for product rendering, with a good balance between ease of use and rendering results.

Good to know.
I've noticed that SU isn't exactly highly efficient in the way it deals with high polygon counts and my current project has a lot of radii so the lag is noticeable.

@unknownuser said:

@unknownuser said:

So not being able to select a group directly (from a hierarchy)

Menu Window / Outliner ?

smacks head Thank you Pilou! I can't believe the Outliner has been there in front of my face the whole time and I never knew about it! I was doing all these web searches under words like "group tree" and "group diagram" etc. but had no success.

What I'm doing is working with multi-hinged product parts that work like a skeletal system where I'm often moving or rotating many different groupings of parts in order to check for clearances and contrasts with other parts or groupings. It wouldn't be much of a big deal except that by changing the position of one object can entail having to change the position of multiple other objects (or groups). So not being able to select a group directly (from a hierarchy) ends up taking a lot of time just to move and check position changes.

I'm hoping there are possibly plugins that have been written to do the following:

1. Something that lets you pick a group within a "tree" of nested groupings (possibly by designating a name?) so that you don't have to click through the hierarchy of groups to get to the one group you want.

2. Something that allows you to designate a locking rotation point on an object, so that when the rotation tool is selected (or when a modified rotation tool is selected) it will automatically snap to the designated point on an object or group.

Any suggestions or possible work arounds?

It's actually cool to see people making donations to valued plugin programmers. I'm working through a prototyping, but as soon as I make any money, I'm committed to donate accordingly.

Sort of... I also need the center piece to be the movable dynamic piece and have the outer pieces move accordingly depending on which way the center piece is moved.

All I'm trying to do is make a three piece hinge with two constrained hinge points. I believe this would involve nesting a 2 piece dynamic component hinge with constrained axis-es points into another dynamic component that constrains the axis-es points of the first component to create the second hinge.

I feel a bit stupid for even having to ask on this, but I've tried multiple combinations of setting the three pieces as components and/or groups with accompanying "change axis" points but every time I change the axis for the second dynamic component group, or if I constrain the position of a single piece, without fail it changes to the location of the hinge pieces ( I'm not changing the coordinates, I'm using the same coordinates that SU designates ).

It just seems odd to me that making a two piece hinge is so straight forward, but then nesting constrained dynamic pieces seems to screw everything up.

Suggestions?

Without the insight and information I've received from this forum, I probably wouldn't even be using Sketchup. That's the truth. Sketchucation has been an indispensable part of my whole Sketchup experience, because the program itself would have been worthless without SCF as a hub of knowledge.

I guess what it boils down to is that I don't think anybody who uses Sketchup regularly and knows about this forum will be ditching it just because some other forum comes along, regardless of whose running it.

Just gotta say that the Tgi3D plugin is amazing. I've been messing around with it, trying to familiarize myself with how it works, and I'm just stunned.

Hey thanks to all you guys, Sketchy FFD is exactly what I was hoping to find, but these other tools are great as well and I plan on using all of them!

I guess what I'm really looking for is more of a deformation tool that will take a single edge or plane and allow it to be curved (moved) in isolated segments. In Maya and some of the other organic modellers this is usually called a lattice (which is probably what I should have asked for to begin with...) but basically a lattice allows you to designate a custom scaling box around an object with user specified number of evenly spaced handles on all three planes, but instead of "scale" handles they work as "move" handles affecting only an isolated area of the shape that fits between one handle to the next and by moving a handle the lattice will automatically insert the necessary vertices and edges to make the deformation happen. Is there a plugin that might do something along these line.

I'm wondering if there is a plugin or a relatively easy way to replace a line with a curve that is already part of a piece of built geometry?

Thanks for the component tip Trog!

It's almost as if the formation of new edge geometry needs to be carried out one more decimal place in the formula in order to be recognized?

Does anyone know why larger sizes of objects tend to perform properly when doing boolean operations and small sizes have more of a tendency to leave missing faces and/or create artifact lines? I can't see why size would make a difference when doing these operations, especially when the measurements are set to mm?

I can honestly say that thomthoms solid inspector plugin turned SU from a program that I used to use sometimes into a program that I now use almost daily.

Another problem that seems to be associated with those micro gaps is that when fixed, often it creates a dual face, especially so when dealing with very small areas.

I think one aspect that the Sketchup development team needs to recognize is that Sketchup is positioned to be the most widely used and recognized program associated with 3D printing, but this means that Sketchup has to be able to deal with very small geometry, as most of 3D printing currently deals with smaller more ornamental forms.