Everything related to the integration for SketchUp.
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By Mihai
#396326
I create a 500m plane in Sketchup 2017, make it a group and apply the Maxwell Sea modifier to it. The problem is the settings won't match what you would get in Studio, because that 500m plane actually exports as a scale of 1 when I opened it to check in Studio. It's actually the size of 500m but the transform panel says 1. If I click Reset, the plane goes scales down in the viewport to be 1m.

So something weird is going on when you change the settings of the sea object, at least for the dimension setting. It's as if the dimension setting is actually 500x smaller...
By JDHill
#396334
I think I see what's happening; from the plugin's point of view, it is basically exporting a bounding box. So, it gets the bounds of the group to which maxwell sea is applied, creates a maxwell sea extension, and scales it according to those bounds. However, scaling is not all that is involved, the extension must have applied the entire transformation of the group, and it's here where I think the issue comes in -- it is not necessarily possible to decompose the transformation, to obtain separate rotation and scaling factors, which is why you see it as scale=1 and rotation=0 in studio. For rendering, the transform is simply used as provided, so the same issue does not arise in that case.

And if you notice, when you click Reset for scale in studio, it resets both the scale and rotation of the object; if it was rotated before, it no longer is, afterward. The question is whether there is perhaps an adjustment to how this is being exported, e.g. parenting the extension under another (null) object and applying the transform to the parent. I can't say much about this without testing, because it depends on the behavior of the extension, and also because exporting transforms from SU is generally touchy (i.e. it's easy to do something that appears to work in most cases, but then find cases where it ends up putting things in wacky orientations in studio).
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By Mihai
#396337
I suppose since the extension works with real world scale values in its settings, it needs to "know" how large it is in reality and it thinks it's always 1m when exported from Sketchup. Just checked quickly with the Volumetric extension an it's the same issue. So where does the scale and rotation live for these exported extensions, if the numeric shows defaults, but obviously it opens them in the correct scale and rotation in Studio?
By JDHill
#396338
There isn't scale & rotation as such, they are part of a general transformation (obtained from SketchUp) applied to the object. There do exist in the maxwell sdk a set of optional position/scale/rotation values that plugins can set, mainly as a hint to studio, for if/when the host application provides that information separately. But SketchUp provides only the transformation as a whole, so the plugin does not set those; reason being, the plugin could do no better than studio at guessing a correct set of pos/rot/sca values, so it leaves them unset, and lets studio decide whether or not it wants to attempt decomposition (which I believe it does not end up doing, at least not at the current time).
Will there be a Maxwell Render 6 ?

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