[shampden]

maxwellians,

we've been trying to use maxwell for a while in our work flow and have had what seem to be unpredictable results - a model will work well for quite a while in the beginning, and then one day the exported renderings will just start to fail.

it appears the issue is that if a texture is embedded in the model and does not exist as an image file on your local machine, the maxwell render will fail (on a mac). so when we download a stock model from formfonts.com, and there is a texture embedded in it and stick it in our scene it causes the rendering to fail - or if someone does a model on one machine with a custom texture, and the it is opened and rendered on another machine it will fail.

after finding the correlation the other day, i installed maxwell and sketchup on a windows box to see if it was able to deal with the render properly, and it rendered without a hitch, the embedded texture was exported, and showed up properly in the rendering.

so apparently the mac version of skp2mxs_v2.0_osx is not extracting the textures from a model unless they are stored as an image on the local machine (and i can find no way to extract the image from a model and make it work) trying the same thing with the windows version of skp2mxs_v2.0 works on the same model!

would love to see this resolved, or just as glad if someone points out something i may be doing wrong, as we currently can't really use it productively in our workflow.

here is a small sample model which is choking the mac version and working on the windows version:

http://www.castarchitecture.com/downloa ... st.skp.zip

thoughts / insight / fix all greatly appreciated!

-stefan

note the textures folder is empty and the text from render error reads:
ERROR: - File "/Users/stefan/Desktop/test/maxwell_sketchup_test_Textures/\Documents and Settings\rob\Desktop\1.jpg" has not been found. Render cannot continue.

ERROR: - Render Failed

[Richard]

Mate it sounds like it must be something born from working over a network! I've never had this issue when working with imported models on just the one machine!

As a work around you could try to save the textures out of the material browser manually! Pain though!

[shampden]

Mate it sounds like it must be something born from working over a network! I've never had this issue when working with imported models on just the one machine!

As a work around you could try to save the textures out of the material browser manually! Pain though!

richard,

if you are running SU->maxwell on a mac could you try rendering my test model and see if it works (see url below). also do you know of a way to extract the image from a texture imbedded in sketchup? i can't figure out a way to do it (any workaround would be great though you are correct it would be a pain for a big project).

http://www.castarchitecture.com/downloa ... st.skp.zip

[Richard]

Sorry mate I'm on PC!

To save out the texture from SU on PC (I think it should be same for a mac) right click on the material in the material browser and select export texture image!

[pelias]

Unfortunately this is a know issue in SU - if the project was transfered from Windows to Mac then the export of textures will fail due to corrupted image paths. This can be verified using a simple Ruby script:

tw = Sketchup.create_texture_writer
tw.write_all("/Users/pavol/test", false)

Maxwell plugins uses this functionality to export all textures and thus failes exporting textures as well.

The only solution as far as I know is to re-link the textures individually. I've started to work on a Ruby script which would do that automatically but the script is not ready yet.

Pavol

[shampden]

Unfortunately this is a know issue in SU - if the project was transfered from Windows to Mac then the export of textures will fail due to corrupted image paths. This can be verified using a simple Ruby script:

tw = Sketchup.create_texture_writer
tw.write_all("/Users/pavol/test", false)

Maxwell plugins uses this functionality to export all textures and thus failes exporting textures as well.

The only solution as far as I know is to re-link the textures individually. I've started to work on a Ruby script which would do that automatically but the script is not ready yet.

Pavol

pavol (pelias),

was wondering if you have had any luck with the ruby script to automate re-linking textures in SU? not sure if it would help but i recently found a ruby script which allowed one to export a linked texture image on the mac. it's called rps_texturewrite.rb and can be found at:

http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf ... &sk=t&sd=a

if anyone from maxwell is listening, this sketchup issue is still keeping us from using maxwell in any meaningful way in our office. if anyone has a workaround I would greatly appreciate the help.

thanks
stefan

[macitect]

I am in the same boat as shampden.

Please address.

[pelias]

I've rewrote the relevant part of the Maxwell exporter so that even if WriteAllTextures fails the textures are still exported. I am currently testing it, if no problems are found the fix should be released to public soon.

Pavol

[shampden]

I've rewrote the relevant part of the Maxwell exporter so that even if WriteAllTextures fails the textures are still exported. I am currently testing it, if no problems are found the fix should be released to public soon.

Pavol

Pavol,

that is great news! can't wait to be able to use the export plugin again! please let me know if you need a beta tester, would be happy to take it for a spin and let you know of any issues i can dredge up.

-Stefan