Skindigo+Sketchup 8+Wine 1.5.5+IndigoRT(Linux Ver.) Help!

[tricarpa]

Hi all, just recently discovered Indigo renderer, and it has added a whole new dimension to my design work cheers My question is basically how can I get Skindigo to work well/properly using Wine 1.5.5?? Sketchup 8 works fine, I can also export a scene using Skindigo(need to hack the mesh.igs scene file to re-point some file stuff not sure if that is normally for Linux uses).

The REAL problem I am having is in Sketchup when I try and access the Skindigo Material Editor or Render Settings, Sketchup just crashes This makes things very annoying and difficult to apply things like lights etc. or even to do any HDR stuff. I have trawled the net for a fix to this but I just can't find one anywhere.

Please help, this is causing a HUGE amount of wasted time and money.

Cheers
P.S. I tried to Attach the crash log file but it won't let me.

[tricarpa]

I thought I would add the bugsplat log file contents if that helps:-

2012-06-05 11:39:51 Entered Unhandled Exception Filter

2012-06-05 11:39:53 Minidump file successfully saved

C:\users\kris\Temp\SketchUpMMD529B6.dmp

2012-06-05 11:39:53 Launching BsSndRpt.exe

"BsSndRpt.exe" /i "C:\users\kris\Temp\BsSndRpt.ini"

Also, I have made sure the Ruby scripts work as does Component Browsing.

[Headroom]

Quite honestly you setup with Sketchup running in Wine but Indigo running natively in Linux sounds pretty inefficient for a reason you already provided. You have to mess around with the file locations in the its file manually.
When you get to render more complex scenes, perhaps with external meshes, materials, image maps for diffuse bump, spec ad displacement mapping, UV maps that I could imagine gets to be a real hassle.

If it has to be Sketchup I'd suggest a Windows based system.
If you are willing to learn another very capable 3D software that runs natively in Linux, has an very good exporter then Blender is the way to go. Naturally that would totally eliminate the need to manually edit the igs file.

As much as I am a Blender fan, however, and as much as I love my OSX environment, Sketchup has some very nifty modeling tools that make it very efficient for certain tasks, that you won't have in Blender. Also Sketchup runs much smoother on a Windows system than in OSX.

Just some food for thought

[galinette]

Please help, this is causing a HUGE amount of wasted time and money.

Maybe a windows license is cheaper than the wasted money! You can run it in a virtualbox, it will work fine.
Wine is clearly not a stable solution... It's a big hack that is useful for some tasks, but still a big hack.

Also, if you have no other choice than rendering under linux and model with sketchup (which is partially my case, as I have access to some powerful linux machines on which I cannot change the OS), just consider network rendering. I use my windows laptop for modelling with sketchup and starting an indigo master (which I set to non-working master), and the slaves run on the linux machines.

Etienne

[tricarpa]

the IGS file change takes a few seconds, I just run a search/replace and its done.

I do have several legit windows licenses btw, just chose not to use them as I think Windows is a very poo OS.

I am explore a VirtualBox solution atm but only when I get a spare few minutes.

I have Blender loaded, just haven't spent much time using it mostly due to learning curve. I use sketchup for modeling furniture to show clients but also to produce cutlists and plans to work from. Can I do something similar with Blender? If I can then I think that maybe a very viable option.

One interesting thing is I can get the windows version of IndigoRT to run with in WINE and perform without a problem.