[chedda]

I have made some context buildings for a current project. I used photographs to texture them & then skewed them to fit using the pins in sketchup texture dialog. However they don't map correctly in Maxwell. Also my google earth terrain has a similar mapping problem. Any help would be much appreciated.



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[Half Life]

Did you choose "make unique texture" from the context click menu after the transformation?

Best,
Jason.

[JDHill]

Could you send me the SU file (jeremy at nextlimit dotcom)?

[chedda]

I'll give it a try in the morning when i'm back in the office guys. Is the google earth texturing also to do with unique textures or should i set to a projected texture as it only appears once in the model ?

[JDHill]

I don't really want to comment much on it until we are both referring to the same model. I find that there is some problem here, where an altered texture is rendering correctly in Maxwell Render, but not in Maxwell Fire, but I want to confirm that this issue is the same one that you are reporting here.

[chedda]

Jason if i did the make texture unique for all the faces they render out as solid colours. Jeremy some news ?

[JDHill]

Here is what I have found -- there are two issues:

1. textures are not appearing correctly in Maxwell Fire
2. your google earth terrain texture is not showing up

Regarding the first issue, it should export fine if you (a) close the Maxwell Fire window, and (b) render or export to Studio. This issue appears to be internal to the Maxwell Fire engine itself, so I can't tell you much more about it at this time.

Regarding the second, it is something internal to SketchUp and appears to simply be due to your terrain texture being corrupt in some way. During export, the plugin asks SketchUp to write its textures, and this call is failing. That is why this model takes so long to export -- the plugin has to fall back to asking SketchUp to write out each texture individually, which takes much longer. Apparently, the Google Earth texture is what is causing the bulk-write call to fail, since it cannot be written individually either. That is why it is not showing up in your render: it does not exist on your disk. I was able to fix this by using SketchUp's "Edit texture image in external editor" command, re-saving the image to a different filename (I used Paint.NET, and saved .jpg @ 90% quality), and then setting the SketchUp material to use the new texture file. After doing this, SketchUp is able to write the texture to disk when requested.

[chedda]

Thanks JD. I have seen this problem with google earth in Artlantis as well. I usually build a mesh over contours with sketchup. Then i stitch it into a google earth import. It's a little work in the outset but usually pays off in the end as nearly every view has some context. I am starting to think using a photograph is easier though !

I tried your tip once i edit the image through the sketchup dialog it works fine thanks a lot.I didn't even save it under a new name, i just added sharpness in CS5 then hit save.I have a feeling this may also work on the skewed building textures as well.

On a side note does anyone use google earth pro is it worth it ? I'm guessing the textures are superior ? Does it even work from within sketchup ?



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[chedda]

Nearby buildings work fine from the components browser.



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