[fv]

Hi, its always nice to know about a small succes with Maxwell in combination with Sketchup.

In a competition with 68 registered architects we were selected among four finalists and came out second in the second round. We almost won the competition according to the jury. Second is obviously the worst place to be really in architecture but still its mentionable. All modeling was done in Sketchup and renders in Maxwell. We did however study the design in Modo.

here is the link to the design.
http://web.me.com/fillieverhoeven/archi ... b_3.0.html

The surface of the vessel was done with the plugin Soap Skin& Bubble. Later I realized I could have done that with a displacement mapping as well, and probably with less effort.
The design was about a building for a heat exchange station and heat storage vessel.
Francois

[JDHill]

Interesting design, Francois. I am curious -- do you have a link where we could see the designs of all of the finalists?

[fv]

thats the winner.
http://www.architectenweb.nl/aweb/redac ... oID=229015

In Holland they usually show only the winner. Others are rarely published.

We are often too much concerned with the actual building, looking at details and materials. Maybe thats why we render with Maxwell.
I think the winner has done a great job setting their design in the location and showing that very well. The building is just a pumphouse with a large insulated barrel holding 6 million liters of hot water. The winner though makes it look like this could become a place to relax and look at the harbor. I think that's rather brilliant.

I noticed that I regularly have to restart SU. Otherwise my renders fail at export after a while. After restarting the render starts fine.
Francois

[JDHill]

Thanks Francois, I was just curious to see what they were comparing. I like yours better, but to some degree, that that may be because I think it would be more fun to build. I liked the details on your design too, but I tend to like that kind of mod style...the stylized square bubble motif (I assume that is what it is) is nice and made me think maybe you have Stereolab on your design staff.

On the question of renders failing, that should not happen, so we need to figure out why -- it can't just happen -- there will be some reason. So let me know if you notice any kind of common condition or pattern.

[numerobis]

congrats to the second place!

i had this export problem too from time to time... i think it's a ram issue. It looks like sketchup is not purging the ram completely after exporting to maxwell and so it will crash if it runs out of memory during the next export. For me it only occurs with large models.

[JDHill]

I'm not aware of anything in the plugin's code that would allow that to happen, but I'll do some tests.

[fv]

On the design of the competition, the jury expressed their appreciation for our design but could not justify the extra costs we suggested to clad the barrel in a more expensive manner. The barrel has a 1150 m2 surface. We did feel the barrel surface was a major design feature. The soap skin & bubble plugin was a great help. Indeed building our design is a lot more fun and a little more challenging.

Often winners are less concerned with details. As soon as you start modeling and rendering at a photorealistic level details become visible and important. We love to work on the details and so we are not always the right office to take part in competitions. At least this time we came very close to winning.

On the "fail to export" issue. I assume its indeed a RAM problem. We have only 4 Gb installed in our 8 core systems. We never added more ram since we don't see even the 4Gb used in full while rendering or modeling. I still wonder if adding more ram could speed up rendering. I would not spend the extra money only to have the export fail problem solved.

Tx numerobis and JD for the comments.
Francois

[numerobis]

... We have only 4 Gb installed in our 8 core systems. We never added more ram since we don't see even the 4Gb used in full while rendering or modeling. I still wonder if adding more ram could speed up rendering. I would not spend the extra money only to have the export fail problem solved.

more ram will not fix the sketchup export problem. The problem is that sketchup is only 32 bit, so it can't address more than 2GB RAM - ( crash for me normally at ~1,6-1,7GB)
I have noticed that depending on the scene size and content the sketchup ram usage is increased after export. For example if it is 800MB before export it stays at ~1100MB after export. So if it needs 700MB to export the scene it will crash during the second export.
Sketchup 8 M1 should support up to 3GB on 64bit systems if i remember correctly - i haven't tested at which point it will crash.

[Half Life]

The "large address aware" enabled aspect of SketchUp 8 allows it to access up to 4GB of RAM, but this is only true if there are 4GB available and the OS is Vista or Windows 7 64-bit (XP 64-bit does not work).

If you have 4GB installed then there will not be 4GB available because the OS takes up roughly 1GB during normal operation, and other applications can use some up as well.

I have 12GB on my Windows 7 workstation and I have never had SketchUp/Maxwell export issues... however when I only had 3GB installed this was an issue (at times) rendering large scenes from Maxwell Studio.

Best,
Jason.

[JDHill]

The problem is that sketchup is only 32 bit, so it can't address more than 2GB RAM - ( crash for me normally at ~1,6-1,7GB) I have noticed that depending on the scene size and content the sketchup ram usage is increased after export. For example if it is 800MB before export it stays at ~1100MB after export. So if it needs 700MB to export the scene it will crash during the second export.

As Jason was saying, provided that you have a 64bit operating system, then you will want more than 4GB, in order to let SketchUp access the maximum memory it is physically capable of addressing (this should be roughly 4GB).

On the question of memory being taken and not released, it is slightly more complex than it sounds when stated that way; the plugin's act of requesting data may alter the environment in ways outside of its control. For example, when first opened, SketchUp uses 87MB on my machine; after opening a file that raises usage to 166MB, and then opening a new one, memory usage drops to 120MB. This does not mean that SketchUp is leaking memory: it may be that the act of opening a document has caused delay-loaded code and features to be used, which are designed, once loaded, not to be unloaded again, or not to be unloaded until it is actually necessary to do so. Meaning, I cannot guarantee that the 'lost' memory would not be reclaimed at some future point. Considering again the file in question, if I export an MXS from this file, the first time, memory usage goes from 166MB to 193MB and then drops to 181MB; exporting again, however, it drops to 150MB after the export. The next three times, it ends up at 156MB. I have no way of determining the cause of this inconsistency; it may be by design, or it may not -- the only thing I can tell you is that it is not happening inside of my own code.

Performing a similar test using one of my standard test files, which I got from Francois, and which used to run out of memory when exporting with the previous plugin, the memory usage pattern looks like this (the meaning is maximum usage > usage after export):

• baseline: 320
• export MXS: 533->328
• export MXS: 533->325
• export MXS: 534->325
• export MXS: 534->327
• export MXS: 534->327
• export MXS: 535->327
• export MXS: 535->323
• export MXS: 535->324
• export MXS: 535->325
• export MXS: 535->324

This is pretty consistent, and clearly, no memory is being left unreleased by the plugin's exporter. It may be different in your case though, since not every model is the same; there could be a unique combination of factors that come together to produce an unexpected behavior. It could be that there is a particular .jpg that you commonly use, which triggers an obscure bug -- it could be anything.