Invisible Diffuse Layer

[rspierenburg]

Is there a way to make a material's diffuse layer invisible? I want it simply to setup UV location for bump and spec maps etc.

[40th]

Re: Invisible Diffuse Layer

In the diffuse layer set the transparency color to white.

[thomthom]

Re: Invisible Diffuse Layer

In the diffuse layer set the transparency color to white.

To avoid making the material transparent in SU - use a TexAColor map and set that to white. That way you avoid the material turing invisible in SU's viewport.

[40th]

Re: Invisible Diffuse Layer

In the diffuse layer set the transparency color to white.

To avoid making the material transparent in SU - use a TexAColor map and set that to white. That way you avoid the material turing invisible in SU's viewport.

Nice, I like it!

[thomthom]

Re: Invisible Diffuse Layer

I use the method often, loading a small res texture in the SU slot - keeping the .skp file small and more responsive. Then towards final render I add a second diffuse layer with the high res texture.

[dkendig]

Re: Invisible Diffuse Layer

Yup, it'd be nice if this didn't need to be hacked to get it to work, but unfortunately SketchUp won't let us scoot around that one. Feel free to yell at Google.

[40th]

Re: Invisible Diffuse Layer

Yup, it'd be nice if this didn't need to be hacked to get it to work, but unfortunately SketchUp won't let us scoot around that one. Feel free to yell at Google.

I would love to do so. What exactly are they preventing from you (asgvis), so I'll know what to ask from them.

[dkendig]

Re: Invisible Diffuse Layer

Well if SketchUp kept track of it's UV information like other 3d apps do, that would fix a few problems. Currently in order to get UV information, we have to have a texture applied to the geometry. They also only support a basic diffuse type of material, with no inputs for any crazy stuff like bump, displacement, refraction, etc. Their material system is an absolute mess, here's some of my favorites:

-There's no way to rename a material programmatically
-There's no way to delete a material programmatically
-There's no way to get proper UV information if a skewed texture is used
-There's no way to query a material to see what is using it, instead you have to iterate through the entire scene
-We aren't notified of material changes when you copy and paste between SU windows

So if you look at those little gems, I'm sure you're asking "well wait a minute, I rename materials all the time, so of course there has to be some way to do this"... or "You can't delete materials?!! That's insane! Obviously this guy doesn't know what he's talking about"... but unfortunately it's true, problems like this exist all over the place. We have to use absolutely ridiculous work-arounds for almost anything we want to do in SketchUp.

example:
To rename a material, you have to:
-create a new material with the name you want
-iterate through the scene and find everything that is using that old material
-apply the new material to everything
-ensure that every material in the scene is applied to something, except for that old material
-if a material isn't applied to an entity in the scene yet, we have to create an empty group
-apply the unused material to that group,
-Finally... once all materials are applied to an entity in the scene, except for the old material that we don't want anymore, we purge unused materials (there might even be more to it than that), since there isn't a way to delete one material...

So all of that nonsense has to happen to just rename a material... and that's just one small example of how screwed up SketchUp is to develop for. In any other application to rename a material you should have to do the following:

-rename the material

and that's it.

I realize that having users yell at Google isn't the best solution, I just mention that it's an option, because it's an issue that's rather beyond our control, and would be better fixed by the host application, rather than a plugin that uses the host application. Although users don't typically know the source of the issues, so yelling at Google isn't a very good option. It might make them start to pay attention to us when we tell them that there's issues though.

[Jackson_cg]

Re: Invisible Diffuse Layer

Devin,

I read your post with great interest as this is the first time I've read a step-by-step desciption of just which hoops SU plugin developers have to jump through to program a plugin for SU. That description for the material renaming process is absolutely MENTAL. I feel for you guys, I really do. If I ever find a genie in a bottle, I promise my second wish will be for Google to do a rewrite.

Jackson

[thomthom]

Re: Invisible Diffuse Layer

ugh... don't get me started on missing API methods in SU... :'(

oh wait - you just did!

No way to set/read layer material colour.
No way to set/read a texture Projected property
No access to dimensions
No way to get a material's thumbnail
No way to import/export SU materials
Removing layers or ComponentDefinition needs the same messy workaround as materials as there is no .delete method!
No way to traverse back in the model Hierarchy to the root given an arbitrary entity.
No way to determine if a given entity is visible or not, unless you check the whoooooole model - because the .visible? method refers only to the Entity Info's Hidden property, and you need to check all parent's visibility and parent's layers visibility. ...oh and did I mention you can't traverse backwards in the hierarchy...?
No Unicode support in the Ruby version SU ships - even though SU is Unicode and passes Unicode to Ruby.
Observers ... *sigh* ... they make me cry...

What else makes me cry? This is just a short-list... :'(

And I do rant and nag about this to Google all the time.

[40th]

Re: Invisible Diffuse Layer

That's really sucks. I know that SU's goal is to be simple as possible but as it appears it's pretty complicated.

What if we (SU users) start a petition to google? and get everyone we can to sign it!