By Mihai - Fri Oct 20, 2017 11:17 pm
- Fri Oct 20, 2017 11:17 pm
#395797
Hi Jeremy, I'm hoping you have some tips on how to minimize this step every time I try to preview with Fire or exporting the scene. I do need to use pretty big textures and also place them on a few individual faces for accurate placement. From reading the manual, it seems Sketchup needs to then write one of these huge textures per edited face of my group/component?
I'm using standalone MXM files and my workflow is:
- I create a new SK material, then in the Scene Manager, I switch it to MXM mode and load my external MXM.
- I apply this material to a Group
- Now, if I don't click "Copy texture to Sketchup material", the export to Fire is fast.
- If I do click this button so I can see how the texture tiles on my object, it takes about 1 min for a 5000x5000 texture to load in SK. Not a big deal since it's a one time thing.
- Without changing anything to the texture position in SK, I just click Fire again and SK now shows the "Sketchup is writing textures to disk" message for about 45 secs before the scene is exported.
- I create two more grouped cubes and assign two more standalone MXM files with similarly sized textures, and use the copy textures to SK button. The "writing textures" pop up now shows for about 65 seconds, so it hasn't tripled the time at least, but makes me think there is a fixed, time wasting process that SK does which is not necessarily tied to nr or size of textures used in the materials?
- So now if I want to have control over the position of the texture over a face, I have two options:
- right click the face: make unique texture. I don't like to do this because then I have to choose a new texture size, I'm not sure how SK saves it etc.
- or select the face and apply the material per face.
This second option also doesn't create a duplicate extra material (like the "make unique texture" does) when the scene is exported which is a bonus. I also see this object is still only using one UV set, so obviously SK is doing some "UV reconstruction" to make that work, is that the phase that takes so long each time? Even for a simple cube?
It's just strange to me that SK still needs to write textures in this case (where is it writing them in the case of applying a material directly to a face?) when it's in fact still using the same material for that face too. It's not using an extra material, with a separately saved texture....
What would be great is if I haven't touched the positions of any textures between two exports, for SK to re-use the textures/UVs it has generated already....
I'm using standalone MXM files and my workflow is:
- I create a new SK material, then in the Scene Manager, I switch it to MXM mode and load my external MXM.
- I apply this material to a Group
- Now, if I don't click "Copy texture to Sketchup material", the export to Fire is fast.
- If I do click this button so I can see how the texture tiles on my object, it takes about 1 min for a 5000x5000 texture to load in SK. Not a big deal since it's a one time thing.
- Without changing anything to the texture position in SK, I just click Fire again and SK now shows the "Sketchup is writing textures to disk" message for about 45 secs before the scene is exported.
- I create two more grouped cubes and assign two more standalone MXM files with similarly sized textures, and use the copy textures to SK button. The "writing textures" pop up now shows for about 65 seconds, so it hasn't tripled the time at least, but makes me think there is a fixed, time wasting process that SK does which is not necessarily tied to nr or size of textures used in the materials?
- So now if I want to have control over the position of the texture over a face, I have two options:
- right click the face: make unique texture. I don't like to do this because then I have to choose a new texture size, I'm not sure how SK saves it etc.
- or select the face and apply the material per face.
This second option also doesn't create a duplicate extra material (like the "make unique texture" does) when the scene is exported which is a bonus. I also see this object is still only using one UV set, so obviously SK is doing some "UV reconstruction" to make that work, is that the phase that takes so long each time? Even for a simple cube?
It's just strange to me that SK still needs to write textures in this case (where is it writing them in the case of applying a material directly to a face?) when it's in fact still using the same material for that face too. It's not using an extra material, with a separately saved texture....
What would be great is if I haven't touched the positions of any textures between two exports, for SK to re-use the textures/UVs it has generated already....
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