Problems with new release & plugin

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SketchUp Integrated Plugin (Integrated Plugin maintained by OTOY)

Problems with new release & plugin

Postby oscartung » Thu Jun 12, 2014 6:05 am

oscartung Thu Jun 12, 2014 6:05 am
Hi I am having a difficult time with the new release, here are a list of comments and problems I find.

1. I organize my models into many groups and components, but when i export the models i get this with many instances, is there a way to organize it with just materials where the whole model is export as 1 obj file? (pls see screenshot)
bug 2.jpg
organization


2. geometries/materials often dont sync up with octane viewport after hide/unhide, cut/paste several times

3. material with texture does not sync up with octane viewport when i change rgb/hsl values within sketchup's material editor.

4. stability issue, both sketchup and octane 2.0 crashes way more often compared to version 1.2(where i am coming from) see screenshot. Also sketchup seem to run much slower with the octane viewport active sometimes
bug 3.jpg
organization

bug 1.jpg
bug1


5. Material editor for octane within sketchup is a pain to use (text too small, parameters missing), I understand that it is said that octane standalone is a compliment and i am suppose to edit materials there but isn't now i have to go back and forth between sketchup and octane render, which defeats the purpose of the plugin of not having to go back and forth.

6. Cannot use octane sun with the plugin? it's very hard to tweak the sun's position with sketchup or the plugin (no turbidity, latitude...etc). I consider sun position one of the most important factor in tweaking my renders

7. no localDB with the plugin?

that's all i can think of for now and i guess i have to go back to 1.2 for now. Please excuse my poor english.

oscar
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Re: Problems with new release & plugin

Postby fuzzybro » Fri Jun 13, 2014 1:15 am

fuzzybro Fri Jun 13, 2014 1:15 am
Hi oscar,

1. I organize my models into many groups and components, but when i export the models i get this with many instances, is there a way to organize it with just materials where the whole model is export as 1 obj file? (pls see screenshot)
bug 2.jpg

It's not a bug, it is how geometry and groups are stored inside SketchUp plugin. It might be hard to navigate when you have a lot of components so I recommend exploding geometry to a single mesh and then export it .ocs

2. geometries/materials often dont sync up with octane viewport after hide/unhide, cut/paste several times

Could you please provide test scene? I'll try to track the bug

3. material with texture does not sync up with octane viewport when i change rgb/hsl values within sketchup's material editor.

SketchUp materials or Octane Materials? Again, test scene would be nice

4. stability issue, both sketchup and octane 2.0 crashes way more often compared to version 1.2(where i am coming from) see screenshot. Also sketchup seem to run much slower with the octane viewport active sometimes
bug 3.jpg

bug 1.jpg

It's a first open-beta release so some issues with stability are expected. We'll track it down if you help us reproduce actions to crash it.
As for the SU speed, how many GPUs do you have? Both Octane and Sketchup use GPU for rendering so that might be the cause if slowdown.

5. Material editor for octane within sketchup is a pain to use (text too small, parameters missing), I understand that it is said that octane standalone is a compliment and i am suppose to edit materials there but isn't now i have to go back and forth between sketchup and octane render, which defeats the purpose of the plugin of not having to go back and forth.

I'm still experimenting with materials editor. Octane Material system is very flexible and not that easy display in a clean way. And as for parameters, could you please tell which are missing?

6. Cannot use octane sun with the plugin? it's very hard to tweak the sun's position with sketchup or the plugin (no turbidity, latitude...etc). I consider sun position one of the most important factor in tweaking my renders

Octane for Sketchup is using Sketchup Shadow dialog for the sun position (day, time, offset). Turbidity and power is also available via shadows dialog.

7. no localDB with the plugin?

It seemed to work. Tried on different machine and testers had no problems with it. Could you please double-check?

1.2 is a bit easier to use but all the cool features are in 2.00 :)
Thank for the feedback!

Bro
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Re: Problems with new release & plugin

Postby oscartung » Fri Jun 13, 2014 10:42 am

oscartung Fri Jun 13, 2014 10:42 am
Hi Bro,

Thank you for your reply. My answers/follow up questions are as follows.

It's not a bug, it is how geometry and groups are stored inside SketchUp plugin. It might be hard to navigate when you have a lot of components so I recommend exploding geometry to a single mesh and then export it .ocs


1. Do you mean I have explode everything in the sketchup model into a single mesh? This would not work for me as once geometries are exploded it is very hard to edit it afterwards. For now I use TIG's exporter and it worked fine and I don't need to explode the model, but then it's slow in exporting. Is there a way to export the model in similar fashion of that of TIG's exporter with the in plugin? just an exporter same as TIG's exporter but faster would be great

Could you please provide test scene? I'll try to track the bug


2. I'll attach the scene here, pls download via the dropbox link https://www.dropbox.com/s/29117ywvvgf52x9/3F%20SU7.skp but then this problem occurs on every model I work on (just hide/unhide or cut/paste in paste several times in and out of groups and it gets out of sync) (sometimes the octane material editor comes up and nothing shows up, sometimes I download a material and nothing shows up and yes I waited for quite a while)
bug 4.jpg


SketchUp materials or Octane Materials? Again, test scene would be nice


3. Octane Material. What I mean is that I cannot adjust the color of a material that has texture in it using sketchup's material editor. If you refer to the screenshot below (same model), I want to adjust the blue farbric of the chair into red, in the past with 1.2 I can just use the slider in sketchup's material editor and export octane standalone using TIG's exporter the color change shows, but now I can't seem to do that
color adjust.png

color does not sync.jpg


It's a first open-beta release so some issues with stability are expected. We'll track it down if you help us reproduce actions to crash it.
As for the SU speed, how many GPUs do you have? Both Octane and Sketchup use GPU for rendering so that might be the cause if slowdown.


4. I have 2 GPU, 1 for octane alone and 1 for display. The scene i uploaded when i export to octane standalone using new sketchup plugin and work on it for a while it crashes 100% don't know why.

I'm still experimenting with materials editor. Octane Material system is very flexible and not that easy display in a clean way. And as for parameters, could you please tell which are missing?


5. Many which I consider important are missing I'll name a few.

5.1 Is there no way to lock the view like in octane standalone? what if I moved accidentally and I need to re-render again

5.2 I think the UI is very hard to navigate and make adjustment. Say I want to adjust the lighting of a material I need to adjust the environmental light or a spotlight I need to open the material editor or viewport, expand the pop-up menu, then scroll down or expand the window because it window is not large enough, then expand some more (too many levels), and adjust it(and is it a slider or a input field? if I click near the text it's a input field, if i click further it's a slider..kind of confusing)..once I make the adjustment I cannot see it because the menu blocks it so I need to collapse it to see it, and if I am not happy with the result I need to repeat whole process of expanding/collasping windows again. Moreover the UI is not very legible, it's either the text being too small or the color (contrast between grey text and grey background, in octane standalone(dark grey/white) it's nice and clear)

5.3 I would like to use Octane's sun/sky instead of sketchup's sun(sketchup sun is crap, to hard to control it's position..) And where is the shadow's dialog to control turbidity?
environment editor.jpg


5.4 How to I add IES light?

5.5 How do I 'lock' image ratio, near field clipping parameter, hot pixel removal...the list goes on

It seemed to work. Tried on different machine and testers had no problems with it. Could you please double-check?

7. Where is the local DB located? is it me I just can't find it
localdb.jpg


UV mapping gets out of sync sometimes too I'll post the scene and screenshot in the next post.

Finally I still don't get the reason for editing materials in octane standalone and importing it back to sketchup. For me I always finish my modeling in sketchup and paint everything, then I export to octane standalone to work on the shaders and lighting, and octane is great because its all real-time and I can see the change immediately. In case I need to do some modeling change I do it in sketchup and export it again and the ocs updates with all the materials which I have set up before no problem.

But apparently with how the plugin works this is no longer possible, its not convenient edit the materials with the plugin and if I edit/create the material in octane standalone I cannot see the material in relation with the model which is pointless. I can't export my model to octanestandalone because of how I organize my model (into many components and groups and no exploding it all is not an option). So now I'm forced to go back to using TIG's exporter to do it work, though it's slower but it still works.

Am I doing something wrong, or is there a better workflow? or do I need to change my existing workflow and modeling style? Please let me know.

Thank you for the time for reading this long post.

Best,

Oscar
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Re: Problems with new release & plugin

Postby resmas » Fri Jun 13, 2014 4:25 pm

resmas Fri Jun 13, 2014 4:25 pm
Hello Oscar.

Please take a look at this post, I explain a bit how to explode and send to StandAlone...(if needed)
Of course you can work in SU and don't need to go StandAlone, but in case you need, use that bomb option, and just don't save, re- open you SU file and all your work is still grouped.

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=39235&p=189895#p189895


About the color tweaking, sometimes the color displayed in SU gets broken, if you unlink the material and then link again, most of the times it gets back on track. If not select the material in SU, right click, and "update Sketchup texture" and they become one again.

Another thing, if you want to change the colour of the material, use the color wheel from SU, not the one from Octane Material editor, because it updates the Octane material but not the SU.

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Re: Problems with new release & plugin

Postby ppoublan » Sun Jun 15, 2014 4:07 pm

ppoublan Sun Jun 15, 2014 4:07 pm
Octane Material. What I mean is that I cannot adjust the color of a material that has texture in it using sketchup's material editor. If you refer to the screenshot below (same model), I want to adjust the blue farbric of the chair into red, in the past with 1.2 I can just use the slider in sketchup's material editor and export octane standalone using TIG's exporter the color change shows, but now I can't seem to do that


hi
Made a small ruby script that allows you to change all colorized textures to non colorized textures within your model.
Needs improvement but can solve your issue until Octane support it.
Published it here
viewtopic.php?f=31&t=40563
Yours
Pascal
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Re: Problems with new release & plugin

Postby fuzzybro » Mon Jun 16, 2014 5:56 pm

fuzzybro Mon Jun 16, 2014 5:56 pm
ppoublan wrote:hi
Made a small ruby script that allows you to change all colorized textures to non colorized textures within your model.
Needs improvement but can solve your issue until Octane support it.
Published it here
viewtopic.php?f=31&t=40563
Yours
Pascal


Hi mate,

Cool! I see that you are actually save colorized textures and reassign them. But this will hit the memory. I'll try to figure out a way of solving this without creating multiple textures.

Also, you can try Random Texture in OctaneMaterials window if you need 1 texture to look different of multiple objects.

Thanks!
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Re: Problems with new release & plugin

Postby fuzzybro » Mon Jun 16, 2014 6:16 pm

fuzzybro Mon Jun 16, 2014 6:16 pm
Hi Oscar,

1. Do you mean I have explode everything in the sketchup model into a single mesh? This would not work for me as once geometries are exploded it is very hard to edit it afterwards. For now I use TIG's exporter and it worked fine and I don't need to explode the model, but then it's slow in exporting. Is there a way to export the model in similar fashion of that of TIG's exporter with the in plugin? just an exporter same as TIG's exporter but faster would be great

Yup. But you can Ctrl-Z explosion or save scene before being exploded.
Also, check the link that resmas gave in the prev post, very useful.

2. I'll attach the scene here, pls download via the dropbox link https://www.dropbox.com/s/29117ywvvgf52x9/3F%20SU7.skp but then this problem occurs on every model I work on (just hide/unhide or cut/paste in paste several times in and out of groups and it gets out of sync) (sometimes the octane material editor comes up and nothing shows up, sometimes I download a material and nothing shows up and yes I waited for quite a while)

Thanks mate! I'll try to fix it this week.

3. Octane Material. What I mean is that I cannot adjust the color of a material that has texture in it using sketchup's material editor. If you refer to the screenshot below (same model), I want to adjust the blue farbric of the chair into red, in the past with 1.2 I can just use the slider in sketchup's material editor and export octane standalone using TIG's exporter the color change shows, but now I can't seem to do that

Resmas already covered that (thanks man :) ). "Update Texture" context menu is available when you select some geometry with the material and right-click on it "OctaneMaterial -> Update SketchUp texture".

4. I have 2 GPU, 1 for octane alone and 1 for display. The scene i uploaded when i export to octane standalone using new sketchup plugin and work on it for a while it crashes 100% don't know why.

OK, I'll check. Thanks for the patience!

5.1 Is there no way to lock the view like in octane standalone? what if I moved accidentally and I need to re-render again

I'll add it in the next build (in a week or so)

5.2 I think the UI is very hard to navigate and make adjustment. Say I want to adjust the lighting of a material I need to adjust the environmental light or a spotlight I need to open the material editor or viewport, expand the pop-up menu, then scroll down or expand the window because it window is not large enough, then expand some more (too many levels), and adjust it(and is it a slider or a input field? if I click near the text it's a input field, if i click further it's a slider..kind of confusing)..once I make the adjustment I cannot see it because the menu blocks it so I need to collapse it to see it, and if I am not happy with the result I need to repeat whole process of expanding/collasping windows again. Moreover the UI is not very legible, it's either the text being too small or the color (contrast between grey text and grey background, in octane standalone(dark grey/white) it's nice and clear)

Yeah, I understand that properties popup might not completely fit in the viewport. For that reason you can unfold/collapse other tabs. Resizing window to get the right menu is a pain if you use "viewport" window size which will always restart rendering on resize. For that case use "Sketchup" or "Custom" sources and you won't have any trouble resizing. As for the controls, you can click anywhere and then drag to the value you want, changes will be applied only when the mouse button is released.

5.3 I would like to use Octane's sun/sky instead of sketchup's sun(sketchup sun is crap, to hard to control it's position..) And where is the shadow's dialog to control turbidity?

Yeah, agree with you on that. But SU plugin was build for Sketchup users in the first place with a goal to introduce as few new controls as possible. Turbidity is "Dark" control of the shadow settings.

5.4 How to I add IES light?

In OctaneMaterials pick/create Diffuse material, choose texture emission in the "emission" node and specify .ies file there.

5.5 How do I 'lock' image ratio, near field clipping parameter, hot pixel removal...the list goes on

Hotpixel removal is there (Imager tab, "more" button, Hotpixel Removal and other options). Lock isn't.

7. Where is the local DB located? is it me I just can't find it

What do you mean by Local DB?
LiveDB materials that have been downloaded won't take any time to download next time when you click "Download" button.

Am I doing something wrong, or is there a better workflow? or do I need to change my existing workflow and modeling style? Please let me know.

I'll try my best to help you with the workflow but I think it's better to consult with resmas 'cause he's been doing a great job with the plugin.

Thanks for the feedback!
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Re: Problems with new release & plugin

Postby resmas » Tue Jun 17, 2014 1:55 pm

resmas Tue Jun 17, 2014 1:55 pm
"Am I doing something wrong, or is there a better workflow? or do I need to change my existing workflow and modeling style? Please let me know."

Hello there mate. I definitely changed a few things in my workflow. Hopefully to the best, some not much but its the price to pay to have this kind of realtime modeling/rendering :D

Before the plugin:
- All my groups and components were painted inside with the default color/material - then I applied the material/color to the component, and in case that object had several materials, I painted inside the faces I wanted. - This method didn't work when I had to uvmap textures. (we cannot edit texture position inside a group/component unless we make that texture unique, not cool :x )

After the plugin:
With the plugin this is not the best way to work - its better to paint faces, not components/groups. But till we can pain the groups/components if the are simple (single color) and Octane read them very well.

Before the plugin:
I always modeled in Layer 0 and then selecting the groups/components I made I put them in separated layers (cars, trees, etx etc)

After the plugin:
I try not to use the layer 0 as it merge the lines. now when im drawing/modeling a wall im on layer "wall" an then all lines and faces are inside layer "wall" and the pavement is in layer "ground". This way when I turn the layer "wall" off no intersection is made with the ground because they don't share lines.

I thought that it was worst but then I start thinking and realized that's the same way Blender works and is the best way. If we join geometry we have to understand that the render engine will read it that way.

I made a few more changes in my workflow. Some are more easy to implement that others but I think in all off them was for the best.

In simple work in don't care to much because I can easily edit them, but in complex scenes is convenient to have control off all parts.

I'm an architect and in AutoCAD I most of the time have 50 layers...I dint do the same in SU...now I do in both...and is going really well.

Off course many features will be very handy....lets push Fuzzy and see what can he give us.

This is the way I do it for now...and I know I need to keep changing and adapting to better fit my needs.

cheers
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Re: Problems with new release & plugin

Postby oscartung » Wed Jun 18, 2014 3:03 am

oscartung Wed Jun 18, 2014 3:03 am
Thank you everyone very much for the response to my questions, my response are as follows.

Yup. But you can Ctrl-Z explosion or save scene before being exploded.
Also, check the link that resmas gave in the prev post, very useful.


This may work for very simple scene, but for more 'decent scene' like the model i posted previously (actually it's only 25MB) which has over 1000 acoustic ceiling panels(all components) and many nested groups/components, the bomb ruby plugin just freezes and if I have to explode everything 'one by one' without having sketchup freeze it would just take much longer than to use TIG's exporter.

What do you mean by Local DB?
LiveDB materials that have been downloaded won't take any time to download next time when you click "Download" button.


I was hoping for something similar in octane standalone where materials can be saved for the next project/sketchup file.

After the plugin:
I try not to use the layer 0 as it merge the lines. now when im drawing/modeling a wall im on layer "wall" an then all lines and faces are inside layer "wall" and the pavement is in layer "ground". This way when I turn the layer "wall" off no intersection is made with the ground because they don't share lines.


Ack layers...I thought sketchup I can just forget about layers and use groups and components instead, but I still don't understand the point of putting it in different layers. FYI I never use sketchup for 'large project', I always break a large project into smaller scene, try working on a sketchup project file over 200mb or use layout with over 20 pages and you will be up for a very painful experience.

My main concern is a solution to edit material, lights, and environment conveniently and in an organized fashion since I spent 90% of the time doing just that in rendering stage. I want to be able to adjust ies look, light power, material color and mapping, gamma, sun position size....comfortably. Apparently now I am faced with problems like too many pull down menus/expand-collaspe, material don't sync up if I use the plugin alone for the render.

I will be very interested to hear how you edit and fine-tune your materials for your scene. Thank you for your time

Oscar
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Re: Problems with new release & plugin

Postby resmas » Wed Jun 18, 2014 5:13 pm

resmas Wed Jun 18, 2014 5:13 pm
oscartung wrote:Thank you everyone very much for the response to my questions, my response are as follows.

Ack layers...I thought sketchup I can just forget about layers and use groups and components instead, but I still don't understand the point of putting it in different layers. FYI I never use sketchup for 'large project', I always break a large project into smaller scene, try working on a sketchup project file over 200mb or use layout with over 20 pages and you will be up for a very painful experience.

My main concern is a solution to edit material, lights, and environment conveniently and in an organized fashion since I spent 90% of the time doing just that in rendering stage. I want to be able to adjust ies look, light power, material color and mapping, gamma, sun position size....comfortably. Apparently now I am faced with problems like too many pull down menus/expand-collaspe, material don't sync up if I use the plugin alone for the render.

I will be very interested to hear how you edit and fine-tune your materials for your scene. Thank you for your time

Oscar



Hello again mate, I have downloaded your scene and tested a bit.
Well as I said, for example in your scene I would put furniture in 1 layer, building in another and decoration in a 3rth layer, then it would be easier to model/adjust/tweak everything.

One question, do you want to work/render final images inside Sketchup or you want to teak everything in SU and then save to .OCS and render in StandAlone?

Lets take this project as an exemple :

Option 1: (modeling/exporting as obj)

if you export everything as .obj (with TIG exporter) you have a .obj node with more then 50 materials. Then in StandAlone you would teak all of them. If any change in need in the model you go back to SU, edit and export again the .obj and refresh.

Option 2: (modeling/exporting as obj, Diferent Parts)

You export diferent parts (selections) of your project and then use a Group node in StandAlone to join them. When you have to change something you go to SU edit that object and them export as .obj the part you edited. Then refresh.

Option 3 (with plugin)

You do everything inside SU, use Octane Plugin to edit materials, lights, everything. Render Final images inside SU. If you want you save all project to .OCS format and open it in StandAlone. (a big mess of nodes) but everything you did in SU is there, all materilas, light, etc etc are there (that is amazing)


Now the question here is....would be great to have the otion to export to .ocs as a single mesh? YES (and I belive Fuzzy will find a way to give us that amazing option "save to .ocs exploded" :twisted: , but for now this is what we have with the limitations of Sketchup memory.

Another thing that maybe Fuzzy manage to do is "Save to .OCS without geometry" and all settings , all materials, would be saved to .OCS and then we just need to export the scene as .Obj and load it in Standalone.

But all this option are only valid if you really need to go to StandAlone (for now... we do need because we miss some features)

To solve the problem of messy number of nodes (that plugin needs to do to save memory and fight the 32bit limitation of Sketchup), you can do a few things.

Export to .OCS - open StandAlone, erase all mesh, material and scatter nodes, and keep the material, camera, kernel, etc etc - save
In SU export project as .OBJ - load the .OBJ file and connect materials.

If you name your materials you easily set your project up and running in StyandAlone. 10 minuts max and its done you converted a big project(all edited with Octane magic) from SU to StandAlone without explode anything

Layer are as much important as groups and components.

All modeling was made in SU, and belive this is big...really big.

Image

ISTM.jpg


All was exported by parts/layers to OctaneStandAlone and in the end it was also a mess (but it was my fault rushing things and dint have the time to organize the nodes :mrgreen: )

mess.jpg



I think its all about keep things organized and plan what we will do next...

cheers
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