[JDHill]

SketchUp is the only application I know of which uses a combination of UV mapping and pixel distortion -- the others do what they do through UVs alone, so this issue of having hundreds of unique bitmaps (in SketchUp, you will have as many unique bitmaps as you do distorted-texture faces) does not occur. On the question of a global Ignore Distortion switch, due to the inheritance of attributes, all you need to do to accomplish that is group everything and enable the option on that group.

Regarding layers, yes, during export, the Maxwell "layer" node for a thing comes from the SketchUp layer of that thing, not its parent. This may soon change to be somewhat more like you suggest, since there is actually a problem mentioned in a thread yesterday, which I believe comes from the plugin handling layer overrides incorrectly in SketchUp. However, this will not necessarily affect things the way one might assume, since instances in Maxwell are always hanging from the geometry they instance. Meaning, given three instances of a component, on three different layers, it is a crapshoot which will be found first, and exported as the mesh, such that it is not possible to predict which node the mesh will be under in the MXS.

[numerobis]

ok, thanks

Hopefully now that sketchup moved to Trimble the core development will start again after years of stagnation and will see an improved texture mapping system in the future...

[Natato]

In future versions, would be really nice to have:

- Size largest output
- Background alpha output

[JDHill]

I don't understand, about either request -- could you please explain what you mean?

Output resolution can be set to whatever you like (limited to HD in the Standalone plugin). If you have Maxwell Render Suite, you can render alphas using the alpha channel (in Scene Manager > Output > Channels). If the type of alpha output you are asking for is something that Maxwell cannot do, then you should put your wish in the Maxwell wish list forum, with a description of what you want. If have the Standalone plugin, render channels are not available.

[Natato]

Yes, I was referring to the Standalone plugin, (which stops the maximum size to 1920 px)

[JDHill]

It is not my decision, but I doubt that such changes will be made in the Standalone plugin.

[Natato]

sure,
thanks JDHill

[chedda]

Adjusting sun shadows in sketchup can sometimes be really crippling. I'd like to see a simple sun angle preview perhaps even in the fire window. Studio has this little tool and i think it would be helpfull.

[JDHill]

The Set North tool works nicely with Fire, if you turn off shadows in SketchUp first.

[crcgrp]

Love the new Grass addition.
It does seem to cause Fire to take a little longer, at least in loading/voxelization.

Any chance we could have a toggle on/off for grass to render in Fire?

[JDHill]

I'll see what I can do.

[crcgrp]

Thanks!

[chedda]

I am loving the new proxy abilities it's really a revelation. Would it be possible to also proxy sketchup objects ?

[JDHill]

If, by objects, you mean you want to reference an external SketchUp file without loading it into SketchUp as a component, then no, references need to be in the form of an MXS file, so that we can avoid reading them into memory until Maxwell does it, at render time. If you actually mean objects, then you can already use the proxy.rb script with Scene Manager > Output > Export > Proxies enabled.

[valerostudio]

Would be nice to be able to save grass parameters in some way either as a txt file or other format.