[JDHill]

No, not really any plans to change much here. The proxy geometry is just the set of bounding boxes for geometry found in the MXS reference (with redundant fully-enclosed boxes culled); the point of this is to use an absolute minimum of resources inside of SketchUp to represent the geometry, and I don't predict any changes to it. In plugins that are 64-bit, I also insert boxes for instances in the MXS, but not in SketchUp, and I don't think I'll change that either, since it could easily defeat the whole purpose of using MXS references at all.

[fv]

I just saw a video of Vray for SU clearifying how their proxies work. And the way the proxies are handled there I find a little better. You can actually define how much detail you like to see.

I agree with you that geometry should be minimized for obvious reasons. But not to have any clue on what the proxy represents or how it should be placed, rotated or scaled slows the process of placing proxies down a lot.
I have done numerous renderings with cars going the wrong way, trees that are much smaller than expected (boxes for round objects give a false impression of scale, especially at wide angle views) or placing chairs facing away from the table. I can workaround these issues a little by modifying the proxy geometry but only for as long the proxy is not updated.
When I hide geometry in Studio the proxy remains the same. This is not a big deal really but I have to remember what part of the geometry is hidden.

I hope somehow this makes sense to you since otherwise the proxies work very well.
Francois

[numerobis]

yes, i've seen this too. But it only seems to work if you don't have instances in your proxy object. Otherwise there is only one of them displayed in sketchup.

But yes, it would really be very helpful if there could be found a solution for this...

[JDHill]

As I was saying a few posts up, that is by design -- instances are not included in the proxy representation. The reason is: if your MXS has so few instances that proxies for them would not use too much memory, then you should just export your MXS without instances. And the opposite case: if your MXS has too many instances for you to want to export it as all geometry, then it is likely also the case that you would not want all those instances showing up with proxies in SketchUp. I can consider making an option for it, but I am just not convinced on how it would end up being useful in real-world scenarios. I have proxy detail control in other plugins, but those are for 64-bit applications.

[fv]

I am not looking for large amounts of detail really. Just enough to be able to know what the instance is about.
I can imagine thousands of trees or stuff like grass needs to be minimized to the max. But 25 cars, 30 trees, 50 people and some streetfurniture do need more exposed geometry to work with in a design process.

Basicly you could devide the use of proxies into a few categories;
1. use of very large models that can't be imported into Sketchup but can be handled in Studio. Need for a little more revealing proxy geometry to be placed, scaled and rotated properly. Especially in this case the need to use the Fire engine to get an idea is slowing down modeling. The large references start up slowly in Fire in SU. Its frustrating at times to have to wait just to rotate the reference a little.
2. use of small stuff like grass, flowers etc. but then in huge amounts. The simplest proxies would do. Just a line. And for this kind of work a placement brush of some kind would be great.
3. use of parts of SU-models that are being developed by a team into one big model. Need for a little more revealing proxy geometry to be placed properly. Imagine a housing project were the cityplanner uses mxs-models of the seperate projects as references in a bigger plan. Just a simple cube would be impossible to place. Althoug a clear indication of the axis's and the outer volume would be enough.

From what I understand is that Vray for SU only works with instances that are made from within Sketchup. If thats true I would rather work with cubes in SU with Maxwell. The references we use in SU can not even be imported into Sketchup, to big really.
Francois

[JDHill]

I'll try to think of ways for those things to work better for you, but really, there is just not very much information to work with in a mesh. You might think of an instance of a mesh as a blade of grass, but to the plugin, that blade is just a bunch of points in space, and it's not trivial to try to guess how you might like it to be represented (e.g. as line -- from which point to which other point?). No matter what I do, I think you'll find that you will still get the best results by carefully designing your MXS references, expressly for the purpose of being used as MXS references. So that means, geometry would not be way far away from the origin, some instances would be made as meshes instead, precisely for the purpose of making the MXS generate a useful proxy representation, and so on -- most of what you're asking the plugin to do is stuff you can already do yourself, and you can do a better job of it than the plugin ever could, because you have the high-level human knowledge that gets lost when we translate a model into meshes. As I say, though, I'll see what I can do.

[numerobis]

From what I understand is that Vray for SU only works with instances that are made from within Sketchup. If thats true I would rather work with cubes in SU with Maxwell. The references we use in SU can not even be imported into Sketchup, to big really.

In this video they say that vray-meshes can be shared between the different vray versions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... QvP9idOijo

[fv]

ok, I see what you mean.
I haven't really thought of looking into the mxs models to see what automatically can be achieved. I am not sure how the plugin handles the mxs geometry to split the mxs model into basics for the proxy. I do see a centrepoint but not always. I do see several boxes but sometimes only one.

Models we use are often taken from 3DS models. In Studio that means that the materials are assigned to triangles instead of how you work in Sketchup to Studio were you assign materials to objects.
This means that 3DS converts often have very few objects and many trainangles groups. This will most likely produce different proxy geometry.

Maybe you can let us know how to add or change the mxs in ways that will turn out better proxies or how to make them always show the centre or even axis direction.
Francois

[fv]

to numerobis
I haven't looked at the video again but what is important if with Vray you can reference to Vray meshes made without the use of Sketchup. If that is not possible as it seems to be from what I read on Sketchucation the use of Vray proxies is very limited compared to Maxwell.

I would not just want to start to compare Vray to Maxwell here. Vray came up just because it does seem to be able to have more control over de proxy geometry.

To JD,
maybe its an idea to just change te way the proxy is updated. Maybe the option at update to add the new automatically generated geometry in a different color to the excisting sometimes altered by the user geometry.

Anyhow, I rather see Silverlight make place for something else than you working on proxy geometry. The geometry issue is not a big deal really.

Francois

[JDHill]

Here's a rundown of how it works when you make a new reference, or update an existing one:

• 1) the plugin opens up the MXS and loops through all the meshes
  2) for each one, it goes through all the mesh points, building a bounding box
  3) once all boxes have been generated, fully-enclosed ones are removed

By fully-enclosed, I mean that any box completely contained in another one is thrown away, since it adds no value to the overall proxy. Triangle groups are not considered, and make no difference in this process. If you move the objects closer to the origin in the MXS, then they'll be that way when you reference it. I'm not sure how instancing works in 3dsmax, but if you are creating an MXS for referencing in SketchUp, the best method would be to go through it and convert some of its component instances into groups, or even drawing some dummy hidden groups (i.e. not hidden by SketchUp, but by right-click > Maxwell > Hide > Enabled), since through what I consider a bug, that is still considered by the plugin when it scans the MXS.

[fv]

ok, clear
I sometimes have centre in the proxy geometry and other times nothing. Might be a scale issue were the centre circle is simply to small to see.
Francois

[povaratti]

Hi, any idea whether the new Sketchup 2013 works with the existing plugin setup ? I finally figured out how to get back to Silverlight 4 and render again (thanks for your suggestions), but I am intrigued with the new release.

[JDHill]

No, it doesn't work, SU2013 requires deep changes to this plugin. There's a recent post about it - I'll probably go ahead and make that a sticky.

[povaratti]

thanks. I'll stick with 8 , then. appreciate the heads up and a sticky would be good.

[numerobis]

I'll stick with 8...

me too... but not because of the plugin...
worst sketchup release ever!