...idea for SkIndigo models easy sharing...

[Pibuz]

I don't know if it's a good idea but....

...what you guys think about making a collection on the warehouse with ready-to-render components?
I think that would be useful and handy for everyone!

If this idea of mine is accepted, maybe make this topic sticky?

[Oscar J]

Great idea!

[ak-sam]

Nice idea, but I worry that you could spend weeks setting up materials only for them to become 'broken' later on if something changes in the software. And how would you add these to the 3dw? Create a huge custom collection (effectively duplicating the 3dw?) I'm not sure how that would work in practise.
I make my own library of render-ready components (most arch-viz pros do) but somewhere along the line indigo stopped reading the assigned material settings (when we went from 3.x to 4.0x or SketchUp 2015 to 2018?).

A preferable approach would be to focus on enhancing indigo. This would benefit all software, not just Sketchup.

1) the material browser is pretty sparse and just doesn't work conveniently with Sketchup. For example, if I download "Leaf" to my material library, what am i supposed to do with that material? It has a picture of a leaf and all sorts of settings..but I dont need that precise leaf in Sketchup. What I have in sketchup are 3d leaf surfaces that have a generic Skm material applied. And what i need is for those leafs to look better when rendered. So how do i easily borrow the settings from Indigo's "leaf" blend material and apply them to my skm?

Look through the Indigo Manual at the materials section and see just how complicated it is to create a simple box with water ripples on it. Every other render has a preset or 'drag+drop' way of making water, but with Indigo we have to through numerous detailed steps and even enter custom code??

The simple way around this is to use presets effects that just enhance the SKM material. However the current list of presets is fairly useless ("lampshade" "wax" and "orange juice"???) .
Metals are set up very nicely,...Indigo will detect any skm materials with "metal" in the name and swap them to the "metal" type which has convenient drop-downs for chrome, aluminium, etc. How about we have the same for "vegetation" "brick" "timber" "cloth" "stone" "concrete" "skin" etc etc??
If we can do this, it would have benefits for virtually all SketchUp models (old and new)

2) We need the ability to apply effects to materials en masse. For example, I could quickly select all materials in my SU model tha relate to vegetation and apply an enhancement using the 'leaf' preset.

A new renderer, Unicorn has a 'drag and drop' function within the rendering window which seems quite user-friendly...as an alternative method.

Generally I feel like there has been a lot of work done by the Indigo team to create the programming that enables amazing materials to be custom-made by users, but the actual practical application of this technology is missing. 3d modellers who use indigo because it's fast and user-friendly are not wanting to spend many hours fine-tuning custom indigo materials for every object in their scenes. SketchUp scenes are probably the worst - with 100s of materials not uncommon and many of these coming via 3rd party sources..

[Oscar J]

A preferable approach would be to focus on enhancing indigo. This would benefit all software, not just Sketchup.

I don't agree, if by "enhancing Indigo" you mean the UI specifically. It would not benefit C4D and Max users if they use the integrated Indigo rendering (which has been the golden standard in workflow for the past few years). Your following text is also a great example for why integrated rendering IMO is the way forward for SketchUp too - there's no good way to work back and forth in SketchUp and Indigo.

1) the material browser is pretty sparse and just doesn't work conveniently with Sketchup. For example, if I download "Leaf" to my material library, what am i supposed to do with that material? It has a picture of a leaf and all sorts of settings..but I dont need that precise leaf in Sketchup. What I have in sketchup are 3d leaf surfaces that have a generic Skm material applied. And what i need is for those leafs to look better when rendered. So how do i easily borrow the settings from Indigo's "leaf" blend material and apply them to my skm?

Look through the Indigo Manual at the materials section and see just how complicated it is to create a simple box with water ripples on it. Every other render has a preset or 'drag+drop' way of making water, but with Indigo we have to through numerous detailed steps and even enter custom code??

What other high end renderers have drag+drop ways of making water? Unless you mean default or downloadable materials for pool water, which Indigo also has. Also, you don't need to use code for rendering pool water, it's just one way to make a bump shader. You can also: make a specular material, apply a water bump or normal map, enter a realistic scale - done.

2) We need the ability to apply effects to materials en masse. For example, I could quickly select all materials in my SU model tha relate to vegetation and apply an enhancement using the 'leaf' preset.

If by "enhancement" "leaf preset" you mean that it should be possible to change them to a specific material type (while still keeping the individual textures I guess?), like double sided thin, then I agree that it could be a useful feature.

3d modellers who use indigo because it's fast and user-friendly are not wanting to spend many hours fine-tuning custom indigo materials for every object in their scenes. SketchUp scenes are probably the worst - with 100s of materials not uncommon and many of these coming via 3rd party sources..

To me, that sort of seems like the difference in philosophy between Indigo and the more basic renderers for SketchUp - Indigo might primarily attract those who are prepared to spend more time on their materials and lighting to achieve much better results. Of course I agree that all workflow improvements to material creation in Sketchup + Indigo should be encouraged, as it's such a huge part of the daily work for a rendering artist.

[Eneen]

A little OT here: why people use sketchup when they have blender available? I know it seems easier to work with at first but when I tried it I went into corner cases so often that it almost made no sense to use it. You even can't fix broken models inside Sk, you have to use other 3D software for this. Don't want to advertise blender here, but currently it's so quick to work with that if you want to create interior concept for client you can use modifiers (solidify, boolean, bevel) to model rooms and use linked geometry for assets.

[ak-sam]

I haven't used C4D or Max so not sure about their workflow - integrated sounds good (more like mental ray or renderworks?)

I' m not sure how you would create render-ready components for sketchup given the material assigning process is so complicated.

Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but the sketchup workflow for rippled water is:
1) Apply a water-looking texture or colour within sketchup.
2) Open the Skindigo material browser. Type in Water to search (the browser only shows 30 types of material to start with, so we guess some keywords and see what comes up)/ I'll select "rippled water".
3) This loads into sketchup. It doesn't rename the SKM so it can be difficult to search for these later. But some settings are added to the material (I dont understand the settings but that's OK for now)
4) I render the scene. notice that the water looks OK, but there are no ripples. I need to figure out why -is the scale of my model wrong? Eventually I find the Shader Properties has some code I can edit to change the ripple sizes. Luckily somebody explained the code:

Code: Select all

def eval() real :
	fbm(	
		getTexCoords(0) * 10.0, 		# The multiplier here controls the frequency of the waves.
		3						# The number of noise octaves.  More octaves = smaller waves.
	) * 
	0.01 							# This is the wave height in metres

5) I use trial to adjust the settings, rendering the scene several times until i get the waves looking OK.
6) Then I need to do this each time I render the model?? And remember those settings because they were applied in Indigo not in Sketchup threfore not saved?

So how would you make render-ready components that included water?

SketchUp users are not 3d artists, but they work in architecture, landscape design, civil engineering, product design, education, stage design, forensics, etc. Sketchup is designed to be fast & basic to make 3d models, but the economies of this are lost if it takes so long to get good render results.

My ideal (basic) material workflow would be (eg for water):
Select sketchup material (having already set transparency and scale in sketchup's material editor) then in Skindigo i use a dropdown menu to select material type "liquid" and adjust a "roughness" slider (or value) and maybe a "reflectivity" slider.

Why is it that crappy biased renderers seem to have very userfriendly interfaces, but the physically based renderers expect the modeler to learn physics and programming. Or am I just using the wrong rendering package?

[Pibuz]

Sam, I am a little in a rush here so I can reply shortly, sorry for this, I will come back later for sure.

Using your example, a cool water pool can be easily done and shared.

User A just has to prepare a closed cube. The applied material must have displacement active (with the shader given in the tutorial) and adequate subdivisions. It takes just a couple tests. Then the model is ready.

If the model is then shared, user B must only place it inside his pool "hole", adjust the dimensions with the pushpull tool in order to have side and bottom faces going OUTSIDE the pool's walls. Done.

[Oscar J]

I don't understand what's so complicated about this:

Make a specular material. Add a water bump map, set the bump scale to 2 - 10 cm. Assign to a UV mapped block. That'll be a good start for a water material.

There's no such thing as a "liquid" material model as liquids can both be totally transparent (specular or glossy transparent materials) or totally opaque (phong). You have to figure out how to use the material models in Indigo to achieve your real life materials.

You were asking yourself whether maybe your scene scale was wrong. It's actually critical to use correct scene scale in Indigo, as bump scale, absorption etc are all in meters. The pre-made pool water actually works fine on a normal, pool-sized pool

If you need to make changes to a premade material, you can always save a copy of your improved material and assign it to your model.