[messire]

I was wondering if by chance existed somewhere an skm ( sketchup materials format) version of the arroway materials with the right real life texture sizes.

Reason am asking is I always find it more difficult to use scene manager to get the mxm texture at the right format in SU, for example a stonework 013 which is a 10mx3,4m real size image, when imported in SU comes out with a 0,25mx0,25m size..and you need to edit manually the SU texture into 10x3,4..time consuming! We are using SU on different computers, and all of them do texturing on projects, but only one renders in Maxwell. It would be nice if we could preset all arroway in each Sketchup so they could texture on their own.


Also to be noted ( this is an old topic) > when the texture is imported and used by SU, it uses the original png, without resizing its pixel size, making it quite heavy for sketchup ( after various tests, SU material library using above 200 Kb images get very slow and lack reactivity...)

JDHill, would be great to implement a small image risizer able to reduce pixel / weight of original mxm texture when imported in SU !

Thnx
Nils

[JDHill]

I would recommend using Auto-MXM for this. In other words, create a new SketchUp material, assign it a reduced-resolution version of the texture you'd like to see in the SketchUp viewport, set its tile sizes as desired, and give it the name of the Arroway MXM you'd like it to be replaced by in the render. Then, save it as an SKM, so that you do not have to repeat the setup, later.

[messire]

JD,
That's exactly what I'm trying to do, but automatically would be great ( aka auto resize of the mxm texture when clicking on it to grab in SU..)

N

EDIT: Just went again on arroway website...He has done an incredible job ( as usual): you can download the mxm textures of all his DVD's, as well as the skm library of them all with the same names :):)
All you need to do is copy the skm's in SU and the mxm's in maxwell materials and u're done ( using automxm since the names match!).
each skm is about 400-700 kb, which is fine ( does not turn the material window into snail speed interface..)

[JDHill]

There is something I forgot to mention, which your suggestion of auto-resizing brings up, and that is that you should not use any tiling in the MXM -- textures should use the Relative tiling method, and should be set to 1.0/1.0 for Repeat U/V. And as far as the question of auto-sizing, using the method described, this is not possible, since we are using Auto-MXM specifically to prevent the plugin knowing anything about the MXM file itself, until it is time to export the MXS. That is what allows the use of the reduced-resolution proxy texture in the SketchUp material -- rather than there being an explicit reference to the MXM, and its full-resolution texture, as would happen if you switched the material to use MXM mode, we are just relying on the material happening to have the same name as the MXM file, and therefore being found by the Auto-MXM logic at export time.