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Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 2:53 am
by Whaat
kwistenbiebel wrote: By the way, Richard,
The tutorial Whaat made can be seen within sketchup.
Are you aware there is also an SKP tutorial posted here?
http://www2.indigorenderer.com/joomla/f ... php?t=1780

It needs some updating but 95% of it is valid with version 0.7.1.

Whaat

Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 4:24 am
by Richard
Kwisten

Thanks mate I had already gone right through that instruction, cheers!

I'm not having any major problems at all (except with glass / water) though it took me hours of playing with test renders to remember the same issue with maxwell originally when it took hours to get light through the glass.

I'm still not quite sure after watching Whaat's skippy tutorial how to achieve blended materials other than clipped ones!

Whaat.

Thanks again mate!

So I assume then Exponent map = Specularity map. Thats the sort of things I get lost with varied terminology. And setting like 0.0001 being stated as a lot for most bump maps!!

I guess there is just need for lots of trial and error, lots of trial and error!

Ok found what you mean about Load IGM etc, great stuff!!

The only other question I have for now is what is the enable instancing when you right on a component?

By the way the way you produced the tutorial within the skippy file was a great way to do it, congrats!!!! :P

Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 5:01 am
by Whaat
All right, we are making some progress here! :D :D
Richard wrote: I'm still not quite sure after watching Whaat's skippy tutorial how to achieve blended materials other than clipped ones!
Yeah, this is a bit confusing especially if you want the blended materials to be textured. Here are the basic steps:
1) Create your Material A - Eg. Brick material with a bump map
2) Create your Material B - Eg. Water streaks material
3) Create a Blend material and set your Material A and B
4) Use the blend factor value to control the amount of material A and B. Eg. A value of 0.4 means 40% material A and 60% material B (I think)
5) Important step: You need to apply a texture to your Blend material using the Sketchup paint bucket. This is so the proper UV coordinates get exported to Indigo. In your case, you would apply a brick texture and position it accordingly with the Sketchup position texture tool.
6) The texture applied to the Blend material will be used as the clipping map UNLESS you choose "Disable material texture" in the SkIndigo settings. If you disable the texture, the clipping map is ignored and the materials are blended like a layered material. The texture will only be used to export the correct UV coordinates. I couldn't come up with a better way to do this. Hope it makes sense!
I guess there is just need for lots of trial and error, lots of trial and error!
The whole purpose of including the material presets was to help minimize trial and error for new users. Just choose a preset that is somewhat similar to your desired material properties. You shouldn't have to do much trial and error after that. Check out the material properties in the skippy tutorial to get a feel for what settings to use.
The only other question I have for now is what is the enable instancing when you right on a component?
Indigo supports internal mesh instancing. If you have a Sketchup component that is repeated several times, you might want to enable instancing for that component. Say you had a 1000 identical chairs in an auditorium model. If you enable instancing for the chair, the geometry will only get exported once. It cuts down export time and saves memory. It is a new feature so it might have some bugs...try it out!

Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 5:14 am
by Richard
All great stuff mate thought I tried the blended material and enabling or disabling still ends up with clipped materials.

Also how can I apply a bump map to blended materials if they did work.

Man I don't know how you keep track of all this stuff!

Thats good news about the instancing, will really help for trees :shock: :P :lol:

Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 5:21 am
by Richard
Actually I seem to be having a few issues once I have applied settings to a material and then change the material new settings all go south in some way.

Posted: Sun May 13, 2007 8:21 am
by Whaat
kwistenbiebel wrote: Another thing about Skindigo that is on top of my wishlist:
The material editor in a separate window that can stay open all the time while editing the model. Also it would be handy to have the material browser and material editor combined in one screen.
I have been playing around with a new UI setup that I think will be a nice improvement. However, it will be not available in SkIndigo 0.7.1. (too much testing to do still...) See below for the screenshot.

How important is it that I support SU5? I want to change the UI so that when you have a material selected in the paint bucket and you open the material editor, that material will be selected in the SkIndigo material editor. (If you have a shortcut key set up, you would just push the one key and you would be editing that material)

It is impossible to have the material editor stay open as you are working on your model unless I rewrite the UI in HTML (not going to happen :wink: ). So this is the next best thing. Trust me, it's a great improvement but it will ONLY work with SU6.

So, what's more important: support for SU5 or a more efficient UI (SU6 support only?)

Whaat

Posted: Sun May 13, 2007 9:16 am
by 2kemon
...personally I would be sad to lose sketchup 5 support.
I didn't really find it necessary/value for money to upgrade to sketchup 6,
and I'm finally beginning to get the hang of a render program - yep indigo :wink:

I'm quite certain I'm outnumbered by skethup 6 owners who want an improved GUI, though.

Bet then I'll just have to stick with skindigo 0.7.
But that would mean no "hybrid mode" support, right?

On another note. Whaat - you're the man!
Thank you very much for your great exporter.
I've never really been comfortable with the whole rendering scene, and I still have a long way to go.
But you've been able to make it simpler for me, and probably many more!

many thanks
2kemon

Posted: Sun May 13, 2007 4:59 pm
by Whaat
2kemon wrote:...personally I would be sad to lose sketchup 5 support.
I didn't really find it necessary/value for money to upgrade to sketchup 6
I don't get it. I thought upgrading to Sketchup Pro 6 was free (see link)
http://www.sketchup.com/cgi-bin/store/u ... d=7yp9tYV4
Why would anyone not upgrade? Even if you have to pay to upgrade to SU6 Pro, why not download the free version of Sketchup 6 since SkIndigo also works with that version. You could do all your work in SU5 Pro and do your rendering with SU6 free.

Anyway, I think I will try to maintain support for SU5 even if I have to release two different versions of SkIndigo. There still seems to be a lot of people using it (...not sure why if the upgrade is free)

Thanks for the kind words, 2kemon!

Posted: Sun May 13, 2007 8:17 pm
by 2kemon
I see your point, but the free version has its limitations...
But I suppose i could use the free 6 version to import a finished project and then render it with skindigo. I guess it's a viable workaround.

Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 12:48 pm
by kwistenbiebel
I would be happy for an improved interface for SU6.
Some people consider SU6 is slower than SU5 but I don't think that is true.
It is just as slow :lol:
The fasted Su version still is SU3...but I don't think Whaat will write an exporter for that ancient dragon :P
In the end everybody will migrate to SU6 as all people probably will be using Vista instead of XP, even if the newest version has downsides.

Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 2:50 pm
by Richard
2kemon wrote:I see your point, but the free version has its limitations...
But I suppose i could use the free 6 version to import a finished project and then render it with skindigo. I guess it's a viable workaround.
As Whaat said the upgrade to 6 from 5 pro is free, and for the life of me mate I can't see why you wouldn't upgrade you can still run 5 as well!!!

I would suggest the one single feature of using arrow keys to assign the axis direction to a line draw or move is a worthwhile reason to upgrade if for no other!

By the way I do have to echo your sentiment of whaat making rendering for the masses of SU users a breeze!

Whaat:

Please understand mate I might whinge a little but when I do it is mostly out of frustration that I need to invest more time to learn terminology that is so foreign. Other than that and a few other things that niggle at me I think you have developed a killer plugin!!! :lol:

Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 2:59 pm
by Richard
By the way mate I think the new IU is a better bet! One of the issues I personally had was when you opened a material in the editor it read keep the same and you had to go down and select one anyway as you couldn't be sure the material had already been set.

Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 6:02 pm
by Whaat
Richard wrote: Please understand mate I might whinge a little but when I do it is mostly out of frustration that I need to invest more time to learn terminology that is so foreign. Other than that and a few other things that niggle at me I think you have developed a killer plugin!!! :lol:
Thanks again Richard. Your comments have all been very useful to me. I am sure you represent a large majority of the users of this plugin. Without any feedback, the plugin will not get any better. Hope you enjoy the official version! (just released)

Whaat

Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 11:17 pm
by 2kemon
to both richard and whaat
I must apologize for my ignorance. I didn't even realize it was free. I've been "out of office" for over a year now and havn't been keeping up with software, architecture or anything related, until recently.

Quite a lot has happened on the rendering scene, since I got my bachelor, and it's a joy to come back and find a wide range of different visualisation tools to choose from...

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 5:27 am
by Richard
Whaat wrote:I have been playing around with a new UI setup that I think will be a nice improvement. However, it will be not available in SkIndigo 0.7.1. (too much testing to do still...) See below for the screenshot.
Mate PLEASE PLEASE implement this feature!!!!!

I've been playing more and more with indigo but just keep stuffing up already set materials due to the wake up of the editor at the wrong material - and then REVERT REVERT REVERT it's driving me nuts!!!!