Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

[burchd]

We have created a site topo from contour lines from autocad. the surface has had roads added to it etc.

we have an air photograph of the site as a JPG. I want to apply the material to the surface by 'draping' it.

when i have a flat sandbox mesh it seems to work fine. however applied to the contour surface, the image breaks up.

is there a way to do this?

[aclark]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

It's always best to post an image whenever possible to explain. Also, you might have better luck in on sketchucation or the sketchup help forums.

[burchd]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

ok... i will try this

http://picasaweb.google.ca/lh/photo/...eat=directlink

(i did a link here because im not sure how to do attachments in this forum.

I think that this is a VRAY issue because we are trying to render it using vray. it does break up in sketchup though also

The top site, is what we are looking for with buildings... the bottom one is a mesh, with the vray material applied.... all the gray areas have been pushed using smove..

[thomthom]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

1. Place a plane over your terrain and map your aerial image onto that.
2. Right click the plane -> Texture -> Tick Projected
3. Sample the material from that plane using the dropper tool - you should see a little square appearing in the dropper cursor when you sample from a projected texture.
4. Now apply the material to the terrain using the paint bucket tool.

Note: VfSU does not render distorted textures correctly, projecting a texture onto a irregualr surface as a terrain often result in distorted texture. But usually it's all triangulated and that often makes it render without any real notable deviance from what you see in SU.

[burchd]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

I tried this but we are still getting the triangulation on the image.. its odd that it works fine where its flat, but breaks up anywhere the smove has been used. both for Sketchup and VRAY

Thank you for your effort...

[dkendig]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

you're getting triangulation of the image? What does that mean? The image you provided:


This doesn't show any image triangulation. It shows parts of the image not being rendered, but I don't see anything I would describe as triangulation. It sort of looks like there is more than one terrain for each of these sandbox models, and they're sitting right on top of each other. When that happens, something called z-fighting occurs. This means that when two surfaces are exactly on top of each other, V-Ray can't figure out which one is on top, since technically, neither of them are. So it just kind of randomly picks one piece of geometry or another. If one terrain had a textured material applied to it, and the other terrain was just plain gray, you'd end up with an output very similar to this.

It would be helpful to see what this scene looks like in the SU viewport too, if you can post an image of that also. (Here's how you post images directly in the forum) I can't really think of anything else that would cause this problem, other than not having the material applied to the areas of the terrain that appear gray. Use the eyedropper tool to see what material is applied to a particular face.

Last but not least, try disabling V-Ray for SketchUp, and see if you encounter the same trouble in SketchUp that you did when V-Ray was loaded. If you don't, then it's a V-Ray issue. If the issue still persists, I would point the finger at SketchUp's utter lack of anything helpful in the UV mapping department. It's in need of some additional functionallity.

[dkendig]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

Oh also, did you apply the texture before or after you used the smoove tool? I'm not all that familiar with the sandbox tools, but I wouldn't be surprised if it messed with the UV info on the geometry while moving things about. I also wouldn't be surprised if the face direction got flipped around or something silly like that. Make sure that parts of your texture aren't showing up on the bottom, and make sure that you apply the material after you finish modifying the geometry.

[thomthom]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

Can you post the model somewhere?

Does the UV mapping look correct in SU before you render?

[dkendig]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

it does break up in sketchup though also

I took that as "it looks wrong in SketchUp, and it looks wrong when it renders".

[burchd]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

Ok... here is a link to the sketchup file. I have converted the whole project to a sandbox mesh which is doing the same thing.

https://docs.google.com/a/aetheria.c...NjQwMzA3&hl=en

On a frozen layer, i have the original image. I have pushed out some parts on the right hand side.

I had thought that it was relating to the tile of the material in VRAY, but changing the setting didn't change the result.

thank you.

[dkendig]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

I can't test with the current release version 1.48.83 right now, but this was rendered with our latest beta. I don't see any problems do you? What version are you using?

[burchd]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

that looks perfect to me. We did it in version 1.48.83. we do not have the beta version.

Also noted that your rendering was maintaining the aspect ratio of the whole image, which was also a bit of a problem. those 2 things look like important fixes..

[dkendig]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

would you like to have the beta version? All you have to do is say the word, and I can add you to the testing group. Just head over here to sign up: The Mighty Bug Hunt!

[burchd]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

yes i would.... how close is the beta to being released? As part of this do we get information on new updates

my concern here is that we are 16 offices with about 1200 Architectural CAD users, of which about 200 regularly use Sketchup. Our current VRAY implementation is limited to our western offices, and i dont want to get allot of different versions floating around out there...

Already I find that the distributed rendering changes from version to version and needs to be pushed out...

As we work out these issues, you can see that we have alot of potential for additional licences.

[dkendig]

Re: Site Photo and Sandbox Surface

understood, we have common concerns. I really am not a fan of using beta versions for production work, simply because beta versions come with lots of question marks. The only way I know a build is stable, is by users telling us what their experience was with a particular version. One of the main reasons we held back on releasing a lot of small updates, instead of a couple every now and then, is we wanted to make sure that builds were fairly reliable before we released them, and we wanted to keep the number of builds a user could possibly have on their machine to a minimum. It makes the support process a complete nightmare. You wouldn't believe how many blindly say "I have the latest version" and then come to find out, they're 2-3 versions behind.

The latest build is accessible via our beta testing forum at all times, and when a new build is sent out, I send out an announcement to people in our beta testing group.

My recommendation: test out the beta, tell us if the issue persists. If the issue does not persist, and it appears to be fixed, you might want to wait until the next stable release before you roll it out to your various workstations and offices. If the issue does persist, let us know so we can fix it, so it won't be a problem in the release.

For every user that tells us about a problem, there are probably a good 10+ other users that won't even bother saying a word. Not because they're trying to be mean, but because they're trying to use a tool to do a job, and they don't really have the time or resources to provide feedback or to troubleshoot the issue. Prime example, we have 180 beta testers, and about 1/10th of them actually say anything in the forum. Those are the people who wanted to beta test, not just random users. So even out of the selected group of people that are supposed to be giving us feedback so we can improve the product, we can only get about 1/10th of them to actually provide that feedback.

So in short, if we fix the issue for you, we're fixing the issue for at least 10 other users at the same time, and that's awesome. By all means, please test the latest version and give us your impression of it. Then let us get those changes stable, and we'll have a public release that will work great for all of your machines. Until we have that stable version though, I don't recommend using it for production/mission critical purposes (but I also won't stop you if you're brave).