Several new & weird issues with SkIndigo

[Darthurs]

I've recently done a clean install of Indigo, SkIndigo and Sketchup 8 on Windows 7. I don't know how I haven't encountered these before but I have a series of issues I haven't seen before:

1- many objects in my scene were not being exported to Indigo and did not show up in the picture. I have since found that 'Layer 0' must be visable when you export. I don't recall seeing this written anywhere

2- when I import matierials from the Indigo site, I open then in the Indigo Material Editor, unpack them and save them as .IGM files. When I try to open the file in the Material Editor in SkIndigo it can't find the associated JPG file because it adds the location of the IGM to the path to the JPG so I get something really bad such as 'c:/users/dave/Indigo/c:/users/dave/Indigo'. I have had to open the IGM file in notepad and taken out the much of the PATH statement to get this to work

3 - After all this I am stuck in that the import finally does not error out, but when done the new material is shown in the material editor but never saved anywhere so I can't actually use it. The name of the material never shows up in the list of SkIndigo materials.


Has anyone seen these issues, especially this last one that I am stuck on?

Thanks in advance.

[Whaat]

1- many objects in my scene were not being exported to Indigo and did not show up in the picture. I have since found that 'Layer 0' must be visable when you export. I don't recall seeing this written anywhere

I believe this has always been the case with SkIndigo, but for some reason, you have only noticed it now.

2- when I import matierials from the Indigo site, I open then in the Indigo Material Editor, unpack them and save them as .IGM files. When I try to open the file in the Material Editor in SkIndigo it can't find the associated JPG file because it adds the location of the IGM to the path to the JPG so I get something really bad such as 'c:/users/dave/Indigo/c:/users/dave/Indigo'. I have had to open the IGM file in notepad and taken out the much of the PATH statement to get this to work

I'll have to look into this. Does this problem only occur if you open the material with the Indigo Material Editor and then same it as an IGM file. Then, you try to import that file into SkIndigo?

Try creating a Linked IGM file that links to the PIGM file that you downloaded. If you want to edit the file further with the Indigo Material Editor, you can do this by pressing the 'Edit using Indigo Material Editor' button. Then, make sure to resave the IGM material using the same path and filename as before. If you do this, do you get errors?

3 - After all this I am stuck in that the import finally does not error out, but when done the new material is shown in the material editor but never saved anywhere so I can't actually use it. The name of the material never shows up in the list of SkIndigo materials.

What do you mean, 'never saved anywhere'? SkIndigo will import the material into your currently selected material. It won't change the name of the material or create a new material. Maybe that's causing confusion? Let me know if I misunderstood you.


Hope this helps.

[Darthurs]

Thanks for your help. Here is the additional information

1) It is quite possible that I never noticed this and just by chance I accidentally had Level0 hidden. I don't usually touch this. It really threw me off because some objects were there (ones I created in the model while others were not (components I added).

2) I've never got things to import directly into the SKIndigo material editor using the search option (I get a 'material could not be loaded'. I assumed (from reading other blogs) that it was because they were PIGM files that are available on the Indigo web site. I've seen some critisizms that the product should be able to do this since it has an import fuction but never investigated further. So the only way I have ever imported an IGM into SkIndigo is by first opening it in Indigo Material Editor so that I can unpack it first, then save it, then import using SkIndigo. To add to my original note, I have to edit the IGM file and remove all the path information, leaving the file name. Then SKIndigo addes the path name.

When I create a link to a PIGM file, it comes back and asks me if I want to 'Load Texture for UV mapping' so I select the same PIGM file and things seem to work fine, except that the picture of the model is not automatically updated and the texture is not updated in Sketchup Materials editor. I can click Model, Sphere and render it and that shows up properly, but no change to Sketchup.

3) Sorry, I didn't explain this very well. It doesn't seem to be saving the imported changes much like the linking in #2. I don't mean to say that it is not creating a new material.