[3dforall]

Hey guys, so here's a screen cap of the issue/s we're currently encountering with the SU plugin. What's odd, is that before we used this new sketchup plugin and only used the export to maxwell through the file menus--before this new plugin was released--we were able to import the model into studio with none of the current issues we currently are experiencing. I hope this video helps and we can figure out how to get our models and object grouped and importing like they used to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jksMtjUtpHg

(video may still be processing)

[JDHill]

My first question would be: if you render directly from the plugin, without using Studio, everything works as expected, correct? Secondly, it was not perfectly clear to me what the issues you are pointing to were; I believe them to be:

1. the object tree in Studio does not look the way you expect it to, given the group/component hierarchy you are exporting from SketchUp.
2. some groups appear in incorrect locations/orientations when the MXS is viewed in Studio.

Could you confirm that these are indeed the issues you are pointing to? I was not sure whether it was just the first one, or both.

Also, none of this is really very odd -- this plugin simply shares nothing in common with the old one; where it has solved some show-stopping issues that were present in the old plugin, I am still working out a few brand new issues that the strategy of the new code introduced. So, while I will try to fix issues and to accommodate your wishes in how the plugin works, just be aware that it will never work exactly as the old plugin did.

[3dforall]

When we render directly from sketchup, the components and missing objects DO render correctly.
#1 - "the object tree in Studio does not look the way you expect it to, given the group/component hierarchy you are exporting from SketchUp." Seems to be the issue. The group/components seem all "exploded" and un-grouped when imported into studio. The old plugin's ability to keep our objects/components organized and grouped was a large purchase determining factor since it made the workflow extremely faster and easier.
Is there something we can do in order to have objects that are grouped in sketchup remain grouped in Studio? I've been reading the manual/s and haven't been able to find something about this.
Thanks for all your help!

[JDHill]

Technically, no, group hierarchy cannot be transferred from SketchUp into the MXS format, because the two formats represent objects in an inherently different way. The old plugin may have exported something which appeared closer, but that would really depend on your style of modeling. At any rate, in the interest of maximizing export performance and reducing memory requirements to a bare minimum, the new plugin uses a completely different export strategy, and this does not allow for emulating the output organization style of the old plugin.

The mismatch between SketchUp and MXS hierarchies will become especially apparent when you are exporting instances; in SketchUp, an instance is an instance of a definition, no matter where or how many times that definition is instanced in the model. In Maxwell, an instance is always an instance of a particular mesh and is always attached to that mesh, with the mesh appearing only once in the Studio object tree.

How the model appears in Studio will be affected mainly by two things:

1. enabling Use Instances in Scene Manager > Output
2. using the Separate By options in a group's context menu

For example, start a new model in SketchUp 7, with one copy of the Sang figure. If you make three copies of the Sang component, and then group them, depending on the plugin's export options, you will obtain one of a few different results (Separate By being set on the Sang component):

Use Instances disabled:

1. Separate By None (the default): in the MXS, under Layer0 Components, you will see the three copies of the Sang component.
2. Separate By Face or Material: similar to above, except that each Sang node in the MXS will be an MXS Group, containing individual meshes for each face, or for each material used in the Sang component.

Use Instances enabled:

1. Separate By None (the default): in the MXS, under Layer0 Components, you will see the one copy of the Sang component, with two instances.
2. Separate By Face or Material: similar to above, except that the Sang node in the MXS will be an MXS Group, containing individual meshes for each face, or for each material used in the Sang component. Each mesh will be instanced two times.

As you may infer from the above, one of the main goals of the new plugin is to make sure that no mesh ever appears more than once in the MXS file. The purpose of this is related to SketchUp's 32-bit nature; by using this strategy, you are able to export models of nearly any complexity without running out of memory.

For a more detailed discussion of these things, and also of how SketchUp layers relate to MXS export, please see chapter 7 in the plugin manual.

I realize this may not be the answer you wanted to hear, but it is how the plugin currently works. I will be doing some deep work here in order to implement the new Maxwell interactive preview feature, and I will keep all of this in mind as I do that; perhaps there is another approach which gets closer to the SketchUp hierarchy, without also defeating the plugin's other, more important, performance and memory goals.

[3dforall]

That helps a ton, thanks so much!