[crcgrp]

Hello all,
Maybe you guys can help me figure out a better way to get clipmaps, mostly people, into Sketchup and render in Mazwell.
This is how I've been doing it:
I have a few nice professionally made cutouts I start with.

1. Take the image in to photoshop and add a Fill layer that is pure black
2. Save this as the Color map
3. Select the color layer in PS and change it to all white using Layer Style/Color Overlay
4. Save this as the Clipmap
5. Open the Maxwell Texture Editor and use the Clipmap wizard and set the color map and the clip map.
6. Save MXM
7. Open Skp and create a plane and add a skpmat to it and then in the Scene Mgr I change to MXM mode and find the MXM I created
8. This brings in the B/W clip map, I copy trexture to Skp and scale as needed.
9. Fire and see if it works.
10. Select plane with img and make a component and save component out to a folder
11. Use component as I would any other when I need people in a scene.

Whew!

Is this the quickest/easiest way to do this?

Also, a few that I have done, the rendered image of the people come out faded and almost transparent themselves. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[JDHill]

It depends on your specific needs. If possible, the absolute quickest/easiest way is simply to put a png with alpha in a SketchUp material and allow the plugin to translate it -- it will do the clipmapping for you when it generates a Maxwell material from the SketchUp one.

Otherwise, if you want to do it via MXED, the quickest way would not necessarily be in using the wizard; again here, start with an alpha png, and a new MXM material. Place the png in the BSDF's Reflectance 0° texture, and also in the Mask texture for the BSDF's parent Layer. In the Mask map, turn on Alpha Only. This way, you just use one image, both for the main color of the material, and for the clipping.

Of course, there are other ways too, depending on how detailed you want to get.

[crcgrp]

Thanks for the help. I didn't know that the plugin would auto translate a transparent alpha, that works great.

[Richard]

You'll find a lot of materials in the gallery do it in a few ways as just using an alpha image wasn't previously an option - now it's the BOMB!