[jonny@joma]

Dear All and sundry,

I have created a simple 1 x 1m plane in sketchup, grouped it and then applied grass using maxwell grass.

When I start up maxwell fire i get a brief 'This scene has errors' message before the render continues...but with no grass.

checking the ruby console i noticed the following message..

"MX: Fire error => [Extension MaxwellGrass] Couldn't create Mesh Modifier Extension :"Group<6773> [0.0.0]", skipping... "

Anyone any clues?

Im pretty new to Maxwell so if any replies could be jargon free that would be splendid. Thanks.

Jonny

[JDHill]

I can't speculate much on why the grass extension might fail, so if you could please send me a copy of this model (in SKP format, email jeremy at nextlimit dotcom), hopefully it will exhibit the same behavior here.

[JDHill]

Thanks, I found the problem. Due to issues with SketchUp's handling of RBZ files on OSX, we had to quickly switch back to using OS- and SketchUp-specific installers; the actual grass libraries were excluded from the OSX installers for SketchUp 8 and 2013, and this is what is causing the problem.

As a workaround, you can go to this page, download the package for SketchUp 6 & 7, unzip it, and copy the grass binaries into your plugin installation. Specifically, the steps would be:

• 1. Download the plugin for SketchUp 6 & 7 from this page.
  2. Unzip the download on your desktop.
  3. Inside, navigate to plugin/maxwell/ext.
  4. Select all of the .mxx files and right-click > Copy.
  5. Navigate to your SketchUp Plugins folder.

This step depends on whether you're using SketchUp 8 or 2013. If SketchUp 8, you will find the corresponding plugin folder at /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 8/SketchUp/plugins. If SketchUp 2013, it will be in your user folder, at ~/Library/Application Support/SketchUp 2013/SketchUp/Plugins. By default, OSX 10.7+ hides the ~/Library folder -- to open it, you can click Finder > Go > Go to Folder, and enter ~/Library.

• 6. Inside the SketchUp Plugins folder, navigate to the maxwell/ext subfolder and paste the .mxx files you copied in step 4.

Grass should now work fine in the plugin, just let me know if you have any questions.

[jonny@joma]

Perfect. All sorted.

Thanks for the speedy response.

Jonny