[CDRDA]

Hi,

Strange things are happening when I import a Maxwell Sea object as a reference into SketchUp Pro 2015, running with a full Maxwell license. Trying to save time I created the Maxwell Sea object in Studio as I wanted to visualise the edits I made on the mesh in real time rather than using FIRE in sketchup. When importing the file as a Maxwell reference via the Maxwell toolbar, I can place the object at the drawing origin, render, or use FIRE and everything is fine. However, there is no proxy object bounding box shown in the viewport and therefore I can not select it to delete, or update. Furthermore, closing the file and re-opening it, the reference disappears entirely and I have to reload it in!

After doing a few tests, if I place a small cube at 0,0,0 and then reference in the sea, only the cube shows up in the transparent red bounding box- it doesn't extend up to the sea. Is this a problem with SketchUp not being able to read a referenced planar object correctly? Notably though this small cube in the scene means the reference stays in place and does not disappear, thereby creating a kind of workaround.

[JDHill]

The reason for this is that the sea doesn't exist until render time, so the plugin finds nothing in the MXS from which to build a bounding box, as it creates the representation inside of SketchUp. The MXS is valid, though, so it does let you add the reference, the problem being that you end up with a component definition containing no geometry, which SketchUp apparently culls from the model, when it is saved (I didn't know that before). For the time being, you should do exactly as you did, adding some hidden dummy geometry to the MXS, and I'll look into how to handle this case better in the future.

[CDRDA]

Thanks very much for the detailed reply- that makes sense. It's actually the first time I've had to use the Sea plugin. I'm very pleased with the mesh it creates now I've worked out what all the options do! It is not a huge problem adding in dummy geometry and I suppose I could add a thin box to the extents of the sea object that is hidden to camera, GI and everything else. That way it should show up in Sketchup.

Personally, I think it is just short of a miracle that you managed to make available such a comprehensive set of Maxwell features inside of Sketchup given it's many limitations and different ways of doing things.

Cheers!