[dvsone1440]

I always have trouble creating materials like white china or gloss paint. I typically use the automatic setting with the roughness pretty low.. and the rgb settings around 225 225 225 to keep down any excessive caustics... but I don't get white.. I get light grey. Any suggestions for materials like this in the basic sketchup settings? Also materials like a shimmery fabric. In those cases I want to use something that looks like Car paint but without the high gloss.
Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks

[GMcDowellJr]

It's the closest you're going to get. Look around you at so called white walls and notice they are actually shades of gray. More light should help as can a shift in white balance if there's a color cast.

[dvsone1440]

No.. its not the white walls that I have trouble with. I agree about the "white" walls / ceilings. They are never white, much more grey than people admit. Its any surface that has reflective qualities gets MUCH more grey.. and that is not what you would typically see in the real world. My issue is not with high roughness materials like walls and ceilings. Its low roughness materials that I have more trouble with.

[dvsone1440]

Additionally I often have issues with large textures and low roughness. The best example is one I was just doing. I am working on designing an architecture office.. and I was depicting the boards we create for presentations. I took a jpeg of the indesign board.. imported it and placed it in the skp file. It renders fine in maxwell. However when I then lower the roughness of that automatic material ..(to simulate printing on glossy paper) the image goes away???

[GMcDowellJr]

Can you post the MXM's?

[JDHill]

Regarding the embedded material types in general, they do tend toward the conservative side, since it is so likely that a person will be using an unsuitable base SketchUp material. Furthermore, they are very simple, and primarily intended for use when you just need a quick material and don't want to search for an MXM, or build one from scratch using MXED. However, regarding white materials in particular, as GMcDowellJr points out, their behavior is indeed dependent upon the overall light level and camera exposure; for example, here is the Plastic character, using [230,230,230]:

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It definitely looks grey, but here it is applied to a sink bowl:

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So the short version is: embedded materials are necessarily limited in flexibility, due to the fact that you build them using just a few inputs; when you need more than what they can do, you should use an MXM. The point is, without them, you have to create dozens of MXMs; with them, you only need to create a few.

Regarding your second question involving textures and roughness, I do not have a clear idea what you are referring to. It may be something to point out that the Automatic type uses a bunch of logic to try and figure out what you're trying to do, based on the SketchUp material parameters (color, opacity, etc), so depending on those, you might end up with an AGS material, or something else, being generated.

[dvsone1440]

Hi JD,
I sent you a dropbox folder to explain the issue.

[JDHill]

Wow, do those board textures really need to be 8K x 8K? Deleting and purging everything except the four boards on the right wall, the SketchUp process still takes nearly 1GB in memory. Unless the material has its opacity reduced (in the SketchUp material editor), the Automatic character will not translate this material to AGS, so that should not be a factor. The main question then becomes whether you observed this in Maxwell Fire, or in Maxwell Render. If it was in Maxwell Fire, I can only speculate that render-time memory allocation failed for the textures due to low process memory space and memory fragmentation (an 8K bitmap needs around 200MB of contiguous memory, regardless if it might compress to just a few KB on disk). If it was in Maxwell Render (assuming 64-bit), then I can offer no theory.

[dvsone1440]

No they don't... I had someone else create them for me and I guess I forgot to look at the file size before I inserted them. My mistake.

This is purely in Maxwell Render. When models get big I tend to give up on fire as it crashes too often. Of course this one it was probably crashing because of the oversized textures.

That said.. it was in Render that I was experiencing the problem. (I included the render file that experienced the problem.) which is why was asking the question. In truth I see much less of this kind of thing happening when using fire.. but it is typically Render that I use for the final image. I will render it in fire and it looks fine...render in in Render and the texture goes away???

[JDHill]

Yes, with models of this size (honestly, I don't even know how you work with this, it takes over 6 minutes just to open the SKP here, and I have a fast machine), and especially with such large textures, Maxwell Fire is pretty much out of the question. With this particular model, SketchUp itself is only about 400MB short of running out of memory.

Looking again at the MXS you uploaded, I do see the problem: these two materials have no textures assigned to them at all. I can't tell just from the fact, though, how they came to be that way, and looking through the logic, it appears that the only way for it to happen is for SketchUp to tell the plugin that there is no texture. If you observe such an export again, I would like you to check documents/maxwell/sketchup/logs and send me the export.log file you should find there; it may contain some clues. Note that you would need to copy the export.log file before performing another export, since it will be overwritten.

[dvsone1440]

I will recreate the error and upload the log tonight.

Sorry about the file size... since I have learned about the power of 4.5 ghz processors... I no longer worry about file size. This model is a breeze with my machine.

[dvsone1440]

these machines http://www.boxxtech.com/ make all the difference with sketchup. The difference is night and day between this and my previous machine that was a very well speced dell with much better video card than I have now. The overclocked processor takes large models that I could barely open in the dell and throws it around like its a rag doll.

[JDHill]

Yeah, this machine is an i7-970, not overclocked (so 3.2-3.46GHz), and I run two SSDs in RAID 0. Once the model is open, then things are fine.