Posts by jiminy-billy-bob

There is a ReadMe.txt file provided when you purchase Globe Plants assets. It says:

Quote

For SketchUp and Enscape Render users, please follow the steps below to get materials and textures load properly:

- Create a new folder at the root of C drive called “Globeplants_Enscape”. It should be C:\Globeplants_Enscape

- Copy all files from folder SKETCHUP into the newly created folder. You can copy all the proxy files into other folders as you like as they won’t be affected by user path. The proxy files are SketchUp files without extended name “ _fullGeometry”

I agree that this txt file is not very obvious!

Hello!

I know there are many Skatter users in this forum, so just a quick post to let you know that we recently fixed an issue that made SketchUp freeze when generating a Skatter setup while Enscape was running.

So this should make using Skatter with Enscape more enjoyable

You can download the latest version here: https://getskatter.com/download/

We have also reset all trials, in case you want to test Skatter again. Simply go to the "Extensions" menu, then "Skatter > Deactivate License". This will delete your license file and then you can activate the Demo again.

Thomas

EDIT: Our Black Friday promo will end on December 8th. You can get Skatter for -30% or -50% with Transmutr: https://getskatter.com/

This is because of the lack of relative path support in Enscape.

In Transmutr, do you have "Absolute paths" enabled in the options? If so, does it happen with files you have moved after export from Transmutr?

We have a new extension coming that aims at fixing this issue. It is a file browser (that replaces the Skatter library browser), that lets you import files and automatically performs path rewriting on-the-fly for maps and proxies.

It will be released alongside Skatter 2.0. As you are part of the Skatter beta, you'll be able to test it in the upcoming beta version.

Quote from Zoom

Is that true for fbx as well?

The FBX format can hold unit information. But IIRC it is optional, so you could still get a unit-less FBX file.

Quote from Zoom

I don't know if this is just compression

It is, mostly. This was confirmed to me by Trimble.

Hi guys,

I think I fixed the issue with SketchUp freezing when changing settings in Skatter while Enscape is running.

Can you try this version of Skatter and tell me if it fixes the issue?

https://files.getskatter.com/skatter_1.4.18_setup.exe

Thanks,

Thomas

Impressive!

I'm glad you like Skatter and Transmutr

+1

Ok thanks!

Five days ago, Peter Chamberlain told me the information has been passed to the developers. I've not heard back since then.

Done!

Hi!

When generating heavy Skatter setups with "Render-only" enabled, Enscape makes SketchUp freeze for a few seconds up to several minutes or more.

This happens when there are several thousands objects being created by Skatter.

It could make sense that Enscape struggles to generate so many objects and freeze. But the weird thing is that the freeze happens after Enscape updates its scene representation. When can see the new updated objects in the Enscape viewport, but SketchUp is frozen. And while SketchUp is frozen, the Enscape viewport is still responsive, we can navigate etc.

More info from the user here: https://forums.lindale.io/t/su…r-skatter-generate/2422/1

Thoughts?

Quote from landrvr1

Everyone's software is in a proprietary format, and plenty of 3rd party plugin companies like Chaos with V-Ray have access to AutoDesk's APIs, dev kits, etc. It's not an issue of 'knowing how to read it'. That's not the problem at all, in fact.

It is. There is no SDK to read/write the .max file format. There is no documentation. The EULA prevents it.

Sure, Enscape could have a live plugin inside of 3dsmax, but I was replying to your sentence: "Even then, note that it's still not a direct import of the .max format into Unreal."

Quote from landrvr1

Even then, note that it's still not a direct import of the .max format into Unreal.

This cannot happen because .max is a proprietary format. Nobody knows how to read it, and even if we knew it is forbidden.

I think this has been requested before, but I never heard back.

Thomas Willberger  Demian Gutberlet ?

I think it's possible for us to have Transmutr export .gltf files. If we could set a path to a .gltf instead of an .skp in the Enscape attribute dictionaries, it would be great!

It looks like Enscape uses the .gltf format for its Assets Library. So at least this format is possible.

Quote from tas_1985

Transmutr cannot convert the.max format model

But it's trivial to export an FBX, OBj, DAE, or 3DS out of 3dsmax

Quote from Kaj Burival

I'll love to check this issue, I bet there's some possible solution to this.

If you do find a solution, please share it here as other content creators (like us) could benefit from it.

Amazing images!

Quote from Herbo

- it does take some effort to make them behave right with skatter. I remember seeing a tutorial on this from some time ago

This one, maybe? https://help.getskatter.com/tutorials/creating-a-green-wall

Quote from SedowsGomes

why can it handle something at a meter but not a millimeter?

This is a technical decision that was made very early-on during the design of the software.

John Bacus (one of the earliest people to work on the development of SketchUp) said that at that time, they thought people would use SketchUp only to model stuff on a building-kind-of scale, not small objects with sub-millimeter features.

It comes down to how computers work. Computers can only represent a floating-point number of a certain size.

Here is a simplified representation. Let's say the biggest number your computer can store and represent is:

99999999

And it can have a decimal point anywhere in there, for instance
999999.99

or
99.999999

You can see that if you want a big number, it can't go very far after the decimal point. But if you want a number with a lot of decimal places, it can't be very large.

So the SketchUp team decided to have the smallest dimension of 0.001", so that you can have very large dimensions in your model.

The consequence is that if you have an edge smaller that 0.001", it will collapse to a single point.

To be honest, I think this is a big mistake. SketchUp uses double numbers, so the maximum size of a SketchUp model is about 25,400,000 km (~½ the distance from the Earth to Mars)

They could have allowed for a much smaller precision and we would still have a very large maximum size. (eg 0.00001" -> 254,000km)

But IMO the best solution would be to have a setting to let the user decide where to put the decimal point, so that we could either model a cell, or the solar system.