[JDHill]

Hi all, finally, here is the first plugin build not using Silverlight. The RS plugin does not yet support SU2013, so to try that, you will still need to be using SU8 (technically, you could use it with SU2013, but the exporter will fail, and you would have to fall back to the Ruby exporter). The SA plugin should work fine in any version, but I am only uploading installers for SU8. I am considering dropping support for SU6 & SU7, so please let me know your thoughts on that.

Hopefully, you will hardly notice any difference from the Silverlight plugin. The layout is as similar as I could make it, as are the colors and the style of the UI components. There are some slight differences, though. First, you will notice that fewer controls have the small context-menu buttons:

• Color picker: you can switch the color picker between standard RGB and a new HSV mode.
• Numeric sliders: you can customize the decimal precision and increment on a per-slider basis.

There are various other changes as well:

• Along with preview scene and SL, each material now also stores its own preview size.
• In the texture editors, you will no longer see sat/con/etc displayed in the UI, and tile/scale/offset now use sliders.
• The color picker no longer has the different presets that were present in the Silverlight UI.
• The "Presets" drop-downs found at the top of each Scene Manager page in the Silverlight UI are also no longer present.
• Custom Bokeh is now included in the camera page, and there is now a switch for enabling/disabling Shift Lens.
• The Environment page now works more similarly to the current Maxwell Studio Environment panel.
• The Output page adds many new parameters (also more in line with Studio), especially in the Channels panel.
• There are now switches for enabling/disabling Aperture and Obstacle maps without clearing their paths.
• There is a new Color Schemes dropdown in Options > User Interface, but the schemes are not yet finished.

And here are the links (as usual, please do not publicize or share them):

• [ version superseded ]

So, please take a look and let me know what you think. Please note that the manual is not yet updated, but hopefully, there won't be many changes necessary (besides removing information about Silverlight ).

JD

[stefan_kaplan]

Wow, great. Thank you JD!
Finally Silverlight is history.

I have a few comments on the updated plugin:
1. If the Scene Manager window is open when selecting and applying a new SketchUp material nothing happens in the Materials tab. It used change from the inactive, greyed theme into an active Materials window with the new SketchUp material as the active one. Now you have to pick another material and then the new one in order to edit it, which is not an option, when using a SketchUp material for the first time in a file. Here you'll have to close the Scene Manager window and reopen it... I guess this used to be more intuitive.
In fact, if the Scene Manager is open while importing a texture in SketchUp (File>Import>*.jpg "use as texture"), the image texture won't be applied to the desired face. When closing the Scene Manager window everything works as expected.
2. I really miss the "Reset" option hidden in the small grey buttons (eg. when adjusting values in the materials parameters, it's great to be able to go back to factory settings!).
3. In the long tabs, eg. Output, it's nice to be able to scroll up and down by using the scroll wheel on the mouse (and there are no sliders to drag anymore), but if you accidentally hover over a settings-box while scrolling, the settings might change - and you might not notice right away. Could "scroll to change settings" be deactivated?
4. Thank you for enabling the Interpolate feature as a default in the Materials tab.
5. Three old requests (can't help it, sorry ):
- Ability to select Material ID color for any desired material (the random colors in the Material ID channel are always very similar which often ruins the concept of this great feature)
- A "scale-scene-at-export" feature. Since the lowest value for fStop is 1, it's almost impossible to really play with depth of field in arch viz renders.
- Bump Source mode: "Link to Application". When creating water you need to texture the SketchUp-model's water-faces with a water bump map in order to control the UV-scale of the waves. In the texture field in the Scene Manager's Materials tab you need to change the Source to use NO texture (you probably don't want textured water). But then the Bump Field also loses it's texture, because it is linked to the Color Texture. Please make it possible to link the Bump texture directly to Application

/Stefan

[JDHill]

Hi Stefan, thanks for the comments. As you may infer, the focus here was not on implementing anything new, but on replacing what was there, without breaking stuff. I'll take your other comments point-by-point:

• 1. Thanks, I see this, too. I think it's due to the subtly-different behavior of the SU material browser/editor/assignment on OSX (I develop on Windows). So, I'll have to tweak some things. By the way, you may find any number of small differences like this, since there is not one line of code in common between the old & the new, so please let me know if you notice any other differences (unless they're beneficial, of course).
  
  2. Ah, I forgot to mention about this. I thought about it, and what I decided was, instead of a button in the context menu, if you put your cursor in the text area and hit the space bar, the number will go back to its default. So for instance, say you wanted to reset the scale & offset for a texture, you could put the cursor in the scale U field, hit space bar, TAB, space bar, TAB, and so forth. you can also accelerate mouse-wheel numeric adjustment X10 by holding SHIFT, and on Windows, cut it by a factor of 0.1, by holding CTRL.
  
  3. I know what you mean, but as you know I don't like adding options unless they're absolutely necessary. So while I fully understand your point, my theory is that people will quickly develop the habit of regarding the left side of the window, where all the labels are, as the "safe" scrolling area. As you may notice, I have purposefully disabled the scrolling behavior for the IBL channel mode drop-downs, precisely for this reason. I'd be interested to hear your opinion.

[stefan_kaplan]

Same comment points:

1. I forgot to write, that I've only tested the new Render Suite plugin on Windows 7, SketchUp 8 Pro, so I don't know about plugin behaviors on OSX yet.

2. What great features! Quite hidden though, but I guess new (and old) users will just have to read the future manual on this point... Perhaps some kind of tooltip could bring it out in the open?
Using the spacebar to reset is great as long as you are dealing with value fields but when you play around with (or make a "wrong scroll" over) settings eg. in the Output tab, there's no way to reset. I would like to reset these kind of settings as well.
Would it be possible to obtain the acceleration of numeric adjustment by holding CTRL or SHIFT while changing the values with the arrow keys (up/down)?

3. What I meant was not to add an option but to completely deactivate the feature where scrolling changes settings. But yes, it does make sense to place the cursor in the left side of the window when scrolling up and down, even though you usually find the vertical scrollbar on the right side in program windows...

/Stefan

[JDHill]

• 1. Thanks, I believe I found what you're referring to after posting -- you are talking about when you select a material that is not yet in the model, correct? I guess that when writing/testing, I always dragged them into the model materials list first.
  
  2. I think it will have to be just in the manual, because there are more combinations. Up/Down arrow increase/decrease according to the increment. Page Up/Page Down do the same at 10X. Home/End jump to the UI min/max. I'll see if I can do what you ask here with CTRL/SHIFT too, but I'm not certain how much control I have (for instance, several of these don't work on OSX). For the non-numeric settings, I suppose the context menu buttons can be included, with them just resetting the value directly, and not popping up any dialog, since there's no other function for them yet.
  
  3. I'll keep it in mind, and track any other feedback. It may be worth reminding that there is undo/redo, but if you make the change inadvertently, that wouldn't apply.

[chedda]

Thanks for all the work JD. I have had a very quick test and the interface seems a lot more responsive. I will enjoy uninstalling silverlight from my system (0SX 10.8.4).Is their an official uninstaller ? I also look forward to the 2013 version !

[JDHill]

I'm glad to hear you like it, so far. On Silverlight, there is no uninstaller, likely because Apple's Installer lacks uninstall functionality. If you like, you can delete the Silverlight plugin from your Internet Plug-Ins folder (the procedure is described here), but that's not really necessary, since it won't be used unless you visit a web page that needs it -- in which case, you'll either need to install it again, or not view the page.

[fv]

TX JD,
I am on 10.6.8 OSX and the plugins seems to be ok. Have only used it for 15 min though.
But the plugin is very responsive, difference much more than I had expected. I can now get the panel on and of without any noticable lag. So for this is already a huge difference in my daily work.
Also I see I can now set the draft or production engine very easily. Yesterday I was actually searching the forum on how to that.
Francois

[archigrafix]

Hi all, finally, here is the first plugin build not using Silverlight. The RS plugin does not yet support SU2013, so to try that, you will still need to be using SU8 (technically, you could use it with SU2013, but the exporter will fail, and you would have to fall back to the Ruby exporter). The SA plugin should work fine in any version, but I am only uploading installers for SU8. I am considering dropping support for SU6 & SU7, so please let me know your thoughts on that.

Would be a very very bad idea to stop supporting SU6 and 7!!!!
As an historical SU Professionnal user I have never been convinced going to from SU7 to SU8 and nor I am about SU 2013...
So SU7 is my version of choice for a certain time and will remain until...SU 2014

[chedda]

I noticed that the reset button is now missing from the sliders. Is there a shortcut i'm missing ? Or could this be replaced again ? BTW are there a lot of shortcuts for Maxwell(for sketchup) perhaps they could be tabled ?

I also noticed it can still crash particularly when adjusting textures with fire running.

[JDHill]

@archigrafix: Thanks for your input.

@chedda: On the Reset buttons, please read a few posts above where Stefan and I were discussing that very subject. Regarding any types of crashes, please let me know if there is any pattern to these -- the updated plugin would not affect them at all, because it is almost entirely about replacing the user interface.

[fv]

The new plugin also looks better, a little more streamlined. But the scroll functionality makes it all work a lot smoother. There is a bit of care needed not to change settings, I seem to be ok with that.

TX for adding the open in studio of a mxs reference to the menu. That works very easy now.
Francois

[JDHill]

Yes, that's nice -- scrolling always worked in Windows, just not in OSX (it was a Silverlight limitation).

[Tyrone Marshall]

Hello JD,

Nice work on the SU plugin. I noticed there the output tab has a folder for selecting output for render MXS. When I select this, I get a folder popup which great. However, no matter which folder I select, the button for open is always greyed out.

I understand the manual uses the saved SU file as the host directory. In the future, will you allow the user to set this folder independently from the SU file location?

Thank you!

[JDHill]

Hi Tyrone -- this (the OK button being greyed-out) should only be the case for items in the dialog which are not actually file system folders, so please check that you are not trying to select some type of virtual location.

Otherwise, I would guess it could come down to your SketchUp process lacking permission to access the folders in question, so it may be interesting to hear if you see a different behavior when running SketchUp "As Administrator."

If that still does not help, I am not sure what to tell you, besides that you can go to the Options page and set User Interface > File Browsers to Default. In this case, you will actually have to select a file in the desired directory, since this method uses SketchUp's Ruby API, for which no directory browse function exists (when you select a file, the plugin will strip the file name and keep the directory).

At any rate, regarding your request, this is already the case -- the plugin will only choose to save your MXS at the SKP location, when you have not specified any particular directory in Output > Folder (whether on purpose, or having been prevented from doing so through some malfunction).

So please check those possibilities and let me know what you find.