SkIndigo Progress Updates (Whaat's Development Blog)

suvakas · Post by **suvakas** » Sat Nov 03, 2007 9:27 am

Thank you Whaat !
Will test it out in the weekend.

kwistenbiebel · Post by **kwistenbiebel** » Sun Nov 04, 2007 1:38 am

Whaat,
I think you need to consider a job as programmer ! Really!

The one thing I couldn't get used to in Indigo is that phongs are approached in a different way than other renderapps (exponent thing etc...)
With this 'conversion' to just a reflection and roughness slider things get much much more easy to grasp.

The material editor Gui looks just fabulous.
This is really ingenious programming.

I was thinking, can this kind of 'make-it-easy-and-understandable-approach'
also be applied to other functionality e.g to set up sss materials etc...?

somehow your approach reminds me of the work TBD is doing on Podium render.

Hats up!

Stinkie · Post by **Stinkie** » Sun Nov 04, 2007 2:00 am

Yeah ... same user friendly approach. I'm new to Indigo, but thanks to SkIndigo, it's actually the first render app since Podium I enjoy using.

Whaat · Post by **Whaat** » Sun Nov 04, 2007 6:39 am

kwistenbiebel wrote:
somehow your approach reminds me of the work TBD is doing on Podium render.

Yeah...I was thinking of changing the name to 'Skindigodium' once I release the new version

TBD has done a great job making rendering easy within SketchUp. I'm trying to learn from his approach and maybe even improve on some things.

Whaat · Post by **Whaat** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 7:00 am

It's friday and I'm feeling quite unmotivated.

A few weeks ago, I decided to do a complete refactoring of SkIndigo. For you non-programmers (like me

) refactoring means redesigning the code without changing the functionality. In other words, it's a ton of work that no-one will ever appreciate (except me and whoever takes over this project when I retire). The code was quite poorly designed and did not make good use of objects and classes. This is what happens when you start a programming project before you have a good handle on the language you are writing in.
It has been a much slower process than I imagined but I think it will be worth it. Unfortunately, much of the code is broken right now so I won't be releasing any updates for awhile. I wouldn't expect to release any updates for at least two more weeks. Here are some potential benefits of what I'm working on:

- much easier and quicker to add new functionality to the exporter (and less prone to bugs)
- potential decreases in export time for scenes with heavy geometry
- script will become fairly easy to adapt for other purposes (eg. OBJ export)
- will hopefully create more oppotunities to improve the workflow of the exporter even further
- code will be much more readable, logical, and easier to maintain in the future (I assume that I will 'pass the torch' someday

)

So...I hope no one is too anxious for the new IES and aperture stuff. You might be waiting a few more weeks.

Cheers,

Whaat

ribo · Post by **ribo** » Sun Dec 02, 2007 9:34 am

Hi Whaat,

I want to thank you one more time for your great work, offering to us a very acceptable indigo to sketchup exporter. Since english are not my native language, I cannot express how much appreciate that you spend time and efforts, sharing at no profit the above.

Regards,

ZYX · Post by **ZYX** » Wed Dec 05, 2007 8:32 am

How can you obtain those incredible renders? i left my pc for 8 hours and my renders are worst than the worst in this page made by sketchup.

Whaat · Post by **Whaat** » Wed Dec 05, 2007 8:40 am

ZYX wrote:How can you obtain those incredible renders? i left my pc for 8 hours and my renders are worst than the worst in this page made by sketchup.

Huh??

maybe if you posted an image, you would get some help. Search for the 'All SketchUp, All the time' thread and post your horrible renders

If your brave enough

, post them in the 'Work in Progress' forum. Indigo is an amazing engine, but it is not magic. If your renders are bad, it is probably because of a poorly detailed model and a lack of understanding of materials. You have to stick with it to improve.

I have to say though, if you can't make a nice render with Indigo, you will definitely not be able to make a nice render with any other app!

ZYX · Post by **ZYX** » Wed Dec 05, 2007 9:02 am

Whaat wrote:
ZYX wrote:How can you obtain those incredible renders? i left my pc for 8 hours and my renders are worst than the worst in this page made by sketchup.
Huh??

maybe if you posted an image, you would get some help. Search for the 'All SketchUp, All the time' thread and post your horrible renders
If your brave enough , post them in the 'Work in Progress' forum. Indigo is an amazing engine, but it is not magic. If your renders are bad, it is probably because of a poorly detailed model and a lack of understanding of materials. You have to stick with it to improve.

I have to say though, if you can't make a nice render with Indigo, you will definitely not be able to make a nice render with any other app!

ok i post them already but i think is it a resolution problem, the renders i see have much more resolution than mine, and....yes i did get better results with other rendering programs but i started with indigo because i think it has a great potential.

Kram1032 · Post by **Kram1032** » Wed Dec 05, 2007 9:12 am

he meant, if you know indigo good enough, you wont find a better one

changing the resolution to something higher will actually increase the render time

ZYX · Post by **ZYX** » Wed Dec 05, 2007 9:15 am

Kram1032 wrote:he meant, if you know indigo good enough, you wont find a better one

changing the resolution to something higher will actually increase the render time

ok...but...HOW???

Kram1032 · Post by **Kram1032** » Wed Dec 05, 2007 9:23 am

I answered to that in the other thread (though not too good, as I don't use sketchUp nor Skindigo, so, I can't tell you, what you need to tweak, where you find it, etc, except in post-export-tweaking the res data, directly in your .igs)

Whaat · Post by **Whaat** » Tue Jan 22, 2008 1:38 am

I finally attempted to implement animation in SkIndigo (another thing I promised myself I would never do....

). Here is the result of an overnight batch render on my laptop.

Basically, most things that can be animated with SU should work with SkIndigo animation. This includes things like SU camera settings and position, background color, sun position, and fog settings.

While animation may not be a very useful feature for most people, it can also be used to do batch renderings of various scenes. Say you wanted to render a scene with three different camera angles and/or sun positions. Just set it up to batch render the scenes overnight and you have a nice reward in the morning

Cheers,
Whaat

Post by **OnoSendai** » Tue Jan 22, 2008 1:43 am

Hehehe animation in Indigo

dougal2 · Post by **dougal2** » Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:45 am

.. it's feasible, if you're willing to wait

http://ftlfm.com/gallery/v/indigoAnim/Diamond1.swf.html

SkIndigo Progress Updates (Whaat's Development Blog)

Who is online