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Hi there...

MR newbie here but not new to 3d rendering. a couple of questions about materials and the standalone version:

1) I read the whole manual.pdf than comes with MR4SU standalone and parts of the main MR manual. while I found how to add and control a Reflection Map in MRstudio I wonder if using such maps is possible at all having the (licensed) standalone version only?

2) is there any chance to control Displacement based materials in the standalone version? I understand advanced editing relies on MXED for MRstudio owners but I wonder if some basic tweak to adapt and make them usable is possible...

just to be clear, I don't want this post to sound like a rant... I am just trying to learn this tool and feel a little stuck on those things, so it might as well be me!

thank you in advance,
Alessandro

I'm sure JD will be along shortly, but I'll give you my perspective as well.

1) You can already do this via the Image Based section of the Environments control panel.

2) You can make your own displacement material with the plugin -- and there is nothing stopping you from taking the texture maps for any MXM material and using them for an embedded character-type material.

My main argument for avoiding displacement in the plugin is you are stuck in a 32-bit environment inside SketchUp which means pretesselated displacement (which is much faster) is really out of the question and the "on-the-fly" type displacement often takes alot longer to render which in this case will also tie up SketchUp for a while.

The other thing to know about displacement is that it works best on subdividable geometry -- using the sandbox tools will give you an idea of what I'm talking about, but the best plugin to use to understand what is and is not subdividable is Artisan.

The reason I mention this is I see people trying to use displacement on bad geometry all the time and they wonder why displacement isn't working "right" -- it's working perfectly, but SketchUp has a tendency to easily make geometry that will not displace well... at that point it is up to the user to change their SketchUp modeling habits.

Best,
Jason.

thank you for your quick reply Jason!

1) bad wording... sorry, my fault. I meant using an image as reflection map for a material, surface properties (like in your "rusted" example in the VTC series)

cheers,
Alessandro

Gotcha, you want to be able to set a "specular" map to control where the material is glossy or not -- this is a severe need for the stand-alone plugin and hopefully JD has that in the works.

We already have the ability to load maps for the "diffuse" texture, Normal, Bump, and Displacement maps... so I would assume an additional "tab" for "specular" map would be the most logical option.

Best,
Jason.

ah, will anxiously wait then... glad to see it was not me being blind

regarding my 2) question, I can see what you mean as I'm a SubD modeler at heart (I currently use SU to create the base architecture environment and then use other SubD apps like Cheetah3D or Modo to set my scene up and render internal/external).
Do you mean the mesh has to be just "subdivisable" or actually subdivided? I tried those materials on simple rectangles but I know SU likes triangles... might this be the problem?

thank you again for you patience...

bests,
Alessandro

The classic example of geometry that will not displace well in SketchUp is the extruded circle (or column if you will)... the sides are made of very long rectangles and the top and bottom are circles.

As you alluded SketchUp (and Maxwell as well) is looking at triangles behind the scenes -- and the types of triangles that Maxwell displacement likes best are the ones you get from dividing a perfect square from corner to corner.

This is a problem for the long rectangles of the side of our column because they will result in very distorted and elongated triangles. And it is a much more severe problem for the circle because this is made of many oddly shaped and thin triangles that are all tracking back to a single point... this is all made worse (for the user) by fact that we cannot see this in SketchUp as it really is -- we simply see a solid circle.

Being from a SubD background you already understand this (I put it there for other users who might be reading this).

The solution in this example (the column) is to manually subdivide the surfaces into quads -- the Sandbox tools allow for us to create something that will work from scratch (and also create a manual version of displacements so we can visualize exactly what is happening).

There are some other free plugins that can help with this as well:

QuadFaceTools
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=348501

Curviloft (which is compatible with QuadFaceTools)
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=248195

and

Tgi3D SU Amorph
http://www.tgi3d.com/(the training edition is free and has a tool that is very useful for quick subdividing)


Now to directly answer your question: the more sudvided the surface is, the faster Maxwell displacement will render... but it will also give even faster and better results if the surface is made of evenly sized (perfectly square) quads.

A simple way to see this is:

1) Make a rectangle using the normal tools of SketchUp... say 10m x 15m.

2) Make another file with a rectangle using the Sandbox "from scratch" tool... 10m x 15m with divisions at 1m.

3) Apply a displacement material to and render both of them.

You will see the denser and more perfect those quads are the faster and better the results will be.

Best,
Jason.

Half Life wrote:Gotcha, you want to be able to set a "specular" map to control where the material is glossy or not -- this is a severe need for the stand-alone plugin and hopefully JD has that in the works.

We already have the ability to load maps for the "diffuse" texture, Normal, Bump, and Displacement maps... so I would assume an additional "tab" for "specular" map would be the most logical option.

That would be the rough idea, I am just pretty careful about putting more stuff in the plugin material UI. Other times, I've presided over UIs turning into what I now consider to be feature-creep monsters. You can always add, but you can rarely take away, since people build entire niche workflows around the added feature.

Well if this does make it in there It would be cool to have check box type option to use the map for:

• Base Roughness
• Specular Opacity Mask
• Specular Roughness

I think that would cover alot of ground and allow the user to try a few combinations quickly (via FIRE) to see the results that best fit their needs.

Best,
Jason.

Half Life wrote:Well if this does make it in there It would be cool to have check box type option to use the map for:

• Base Roughness
• Specular Opacity Mask
• Specular Roughness

I think that would cover alot of ground and allow the user to try a few combinations quickly (via FIRE) to see the results that best fit their needs.

Best,
Jason.

now this will make this customer extremely happy

thank you both