Everything related to the integration for SketchUp.
By JDHill
#394453
Apologies for the delay in responding (to your post in the requests thread), my forum account has not been working correctly. On your questions, I have looked into support for Skatter's "Render Only" feature (the plugin should already be working fine with Skatter, besides for that specific feature), and did not find an acceptable way of supporting it. Regarding Laubwerk, I have added special functions to the plugin which allow them to hook into the plugin's export process, but do not know any timeframe for when an integration might be operational.
By designo
#394458
Never mind, i found these words written in Skatter website:

Skatter’s “Render only” feature is currently supported by Thea, V-Ray, Corona, Twilight, Raylectron, Indigo, Kerkythea and Octane.
To use Skatter with all the other render engines, you’ll need to uncheck “Render only”. If you want your favourite render engine to support Skatter, please go ahead an submit this request with the engine’s developers. It has to happen on their side as Skatter has no control over this.

I know that you have the skills to make this happens between Maxwell and the render only feature of Skatter. and we are all waiting for the laubwerk Maxwell support.
By designo
#394459
Also you already know that (thea render support the render only feature by skatter) and thea developers considered to be new comparing to you maxwell team, and both of maxwell render and thea render are the same type of render but maxwell is the origin and has the best Quality also. I think if it will be any connection or conversation between you and the one who develop the thea skatter support it will be very easy to make it happen for maxwell, I think thea has the perfect integration with skatter than any renderer even Vray.
By designo
#394462
JDHill, I tried today the new version of Laubwerk with Maxwell and it's Working....it's finally working :) :) ....waiting for the render only feature for skatter and I believe you can achieve this.
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By Mihai
#394465
If you work with MXS instances inside of Sketchup, would it matter if this "Render only" feature is supported or not? In which cases is Render only useful? If you actually have a component loaded in Sketchup and Skatter creates instances of that? But Maxwell already receives instances from Sketchup? Or is it the case that with Skatter it's dealing with millions of instances and sending that info via Sketchup is too slow?
By designo
#394471
I will tell you why it's so important especially for me, for example i want to make random trees and random grass then i can't judge if it's look good or not unless I press fire so in this case if it's looking good there is no use for the render only feature and this is very rare chance to make it perfect from the first time, if in the other hand that yo want to make it more density and more random so you will start the process from beginning but if you make it with render only from the beginning the process will be more fast because Skatter in the render only save what you have made and name it for you as skatter 1 or skatter 2 and just you go to the render list and this list for render only feature and you press edit then it will show immediately with it's proxies and you just modify the values so you don't need to start from beginning and of course the other major thing is the fact that it's more light because the proxies is disappearing from the view and you just concentrate on the design and modeling. the algorithm inside Skatter by hiding any proxy make the scene full of billions of proxies without even noticing this as viewing or load on the file.
By Herbo
#394473
I use Skatter alot as well, and the "render only" feature would be great!
My workflow for a typical landscape; load af few maxwell models (mxs references), reduce the bounding box to 3 lines (much less geometry when working with thousands of references), and then scatter them around.
But even with the very reduces geometry in the individual references sketchup will stutter and freeze up (or crash) when the number of models gets too high. and it is NOT hard to get to that point :-) a small detailed lawn will do it.
With the "render only" feature you can spare sketchup the task of generating the geometry, and it would make the whole process much smoother.
By Herbo
#394474
designo wrote:
Thu Jun 01, 2017 7:37 pm
I will tell you why it's so important especially for me, for example i want to make random trees and random grass then i can't judge if it's look good or not unless I press fire so in this case if it's looking good there is no use for the render only feature and this is very rare chance to make it perfect from the first time, if in the other hand that yo want to make it more density and more random so you will start the process from beginning but if you make it with render only from the beginning the process will be more fast because Skatter in the render only save what you have made and name it for you as skatter 1 or skatter 2 and just you go to the render list and this list for render only feature and you press edit then it will show immediately with it's proxies and you just modify the values so you don't need to start from beginning and of course the other major thing is the fact that it's more light because the proxies is disappearing from the view and you just concentrate on the design and modeling. the algorithm inside Skatter by hiding any proxy make the scene full of billions of proxies without even noticing this as viewing or load on the file.
By the way, you can still edit a skatter group, even if the geometry is made and the "render only" feature is off. Just right click the skatter group in sketchup, and press "edit scatter group"... I do it all the time :-)
By designo
#394475
Herbo wrote:
Fri Jun 02, 2017 2:24 pm
By the way, you can still edit a skatter group, even if the geometry is made and the "render only" feature is off. Just right click the skatter group in sketchup, and press "edit scatter group"... I do it all the time :-)

Thanks Herbo..... very good tip :)
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By Mihai
#394567
Herbo wrote:
Fri Jun 02, 2017 2:21 pm
My workflow for a typical landscape; load af few maxwell models (mxs references), reduce the bounding box to 3 lines
How do you reduce the bounding box of the ref to just show 3 lines?

I've downloaded the demo of Skatter and from my tests it seems 10 000 scattered items is the "limit". You wait about 1.5min for these to scatter and SU to come back to life. A workaround is to create several scatter groups on different pieces of geometry and put them on layers so you can quickly hide them to work with the rest of the SU when needed. But this is annoying and time consuming.

Jeremy, please try to find a solution for this. Maybe even the Skatter developer is willing to make a change in Skatter to accomodate Maxwell instances? This has become one of the most essential plugins for SU users and Maxwell being the only major render engine out there with no support for it.... :(
By JDHill
#394568
The problem, Mihai, is that Skatter works and stores its data in ruby space, but the plugin's exporter is a c++ exporter, which does not know anything about ruby (a rough analogy: imagine if SketchUp ran in a browser, and you had implemented something like this on the client side in javascript... and then someone wanted you to render it on the server side). I did discuss with the developer about this already, and the only way to make it work would be by some hack, which I am averse to doing both on principle, and because I expect, after doing so, to find the performance hit to be unacceptable.

Additionally, the plugin's exporter has a limited lifespan ahead of it, given that the API it uses is being deprecated; because of this, and for other reasons as well, its replacement will be done in ruby, and as such, will be able to support something like Skatter without employing hacks.
Mihai wrote:
Sat Jun 10, 2017 5:52 pm
How do you reduce the bounding box of the ref to just show 3 lines?
An MXS Reference is just a component like any other, so you can edit its definition and replace the automatically-generated bounding boxes with whatever you wish.
Will there be a Maxwell Render 6 ?

Let's be realistic. What's left of NL is only milk[…]