[SS_RS]

HI,

Architectural visualisation question.

I'm curious how to get the glass material for exteriors scenes reflecting the sky dome/physical sky. Oddly the best effect I've had so far has been the SU transparent grey glass, not an mxm. I realise the AGS is good for keeping things rendering faster. But I'm interested in seeing how far I can push the plugin to avoid post production.

Basically I'm after that blue shine that I've got in the past with Vray.

[JDHill]

It may just be that you need to increase the Reflection value in the AGS Character; try setting the color to a pretty saturated azure, Reflection to 90%, and the Type to Normal, then set up a sunset (switch Environment Type to Physical, Sun to On, and Phys. Sky > Asymmetry to 0.9, and then play with the time of day in SketchUp's Window > Shadows panel), and the camera angle, such that you should be able to see something like this quick test:

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[SS_RS]

Brilliant, worked perfectly. I need to play around with the "blue" to get it right.

Something I noticed with importing the Vivid AGS (and some materials in general) is that I need to change the setting and relink in the textures sometimes. Is that normal behaviour?

[JDHill]

I am not familiar with this particular material (vivid AGS), but just in general, the only ways for the plugin to find resources are by looking in the .skp directory, the .mxm directory (if linking to one), /textures subdirectories at those locations, directories known to exist by their having been used elsewhere (i.e. in other materials) and thereby found to be so, or in the Search Paths that you have set up in Scene Manager > Options.

[SS_RS]

I am not familiar with this particular material (vivid AGS), but just in general, the only ways for the plugin to find resources are by looking in the .skp directory, the .mxm directory (if linking to one), /textures subdirectories at those locations, directories known to exist by their having been used elsewhere (i.e. in other materials) and thereby found to be so, or in the Search Paths that you have set up in Scene Manager > Options.

Thanks. Can point me to a link with a guide to setting up the links to materials? I have a library of materials I've collected from the Next Limit website. When I try and set the search path to this folder I only get the option to "open" when a material etc. file is selected, not the folder(s).

[JDHill]

This is just a flaw of the SketchUp Ruby API -- if you select a file in the desired directory, the plugin knows the context (i.e. that you're trying to set a search path), and will take the directory.

[SS_RS]

This is just a flaw of the SketchUp Ruby API -- if you select a file in the desired directory, the plugin knows the context (i.e. that you're trying to set a search path), and will take the directory.

Thanks again. Just to clear this: I have a library of mxm materials, to get the MR plugin to see this I follow the path to a mxm and the MR plugin with know this is one file in a collection? I.e. I don't need to go through and set the path for every material in the scene?

Thanks for your patience.

[JDHill]

Not exactly; what happens is that when you choose C:\dir\file.ext in the dialog, the plugin chops off the file.ext part, and saves the C:\dir part, as a directory where it will look for missing resources in the future.

The search paths are not specific to any particular type of resource, whether MXM, texture, etc -- what happens is, when exporting the model, the plugin tries to resolve all of the external references; when one is not able to be found (often the case), the search path directories are checked to see if they contain a file of the same name.