[Richard]

Yes I understand! Bugger thats a bit of a shocker!

So JD is it then considered a limitation of the workflow or something astrange with the plugin given it is seemingly newly acquired behaviour?

[JDHill]

Well, I think it's surely something to be aware of when you're modeling faces which will end up being emitters, but as far as it goes -- if something in the model is inverted, then it's inverted, and that's how the plugin is going to export it. I wouldn't really consider that to be strange.

[stefan_kaplan]

Hmmm. I think this is actually quite a problem.
When placing lamps eg. for an interior render, being able to mirror the geometry is crucial.
By using the "Monochrome" face style, SketchUp shows the normals pointing in a certain direction but Maxwell interprets this in its own way...

Model ready for rendering. Both spheres are the same component. Right sphere is flipped/negatively scaled/mirrored:


When using the monochrome button to see the normals, they are the same (white is positive/outwards and blue is negative/inwards):


The rendering shows a wrong result:


Isn't there a way to make Maxwell read the normals as SketchUp describes them?

/Stefan

[JDHill]

The plugin is exporting your geometry exactly as SketchUp describes it; no special alteration of normals is taking place. Whether SketchUp renders things differently in its viewport is a separate matter. I will see if I can do something like specifically reversing normals for geometry where I can detect a negative scaling has taken place, but any approach like this is likely to hold quite a few non-obvious caveats.

For the time being, the proper way to handle this scenario is to fully explode the emitter geometry, so that its location is not being defined by SketchUp using a concatenation of parent > child transformations.

[stefan_kaplan]

I will see if I can do something like specifically reversing normals for geometry where I can detect a negative scaling has taken place

This would be great and much closer to a wysiwyg-experience

[Richard]

JD as mentioned this is new behaviour with the v2 plug and worked fine previously. I guess not to assume that other things now working haven't made a limitation to the behaviour!