Face me has been broken for a while, when will it be fixed?
Here is a face me plane/billboard in Sketchup, a simple polygon with a material on it, nothing else in scene:
I added a little self illumination in Enscape material editor and this is the result:
Without illumination it looks like this:
Clearly a bug, can we get this fixed please?
The blurry appearance with self illumination could be a bug, we will check that.
The shadow is by design, as we do assume that the “FaceMe” is facing the shadow caster when casting shadows. Else, the shadows would change when you walk through the scene and Faceme trees would not always have a shadow that has the same shape as their cutout. It would be best to let the face me not cast shadow on itself but that is unfortunately not possible.
Sorry, but self-illumination faceme/billboards are not supported, as there was basically zero demand for it, so it was not worth the added complexity. Of course the combination shouldn’t cause rendering artifacts though, we’ll look into that.
Oh, did not know that, is that noted anywhere? 'm guessing that there will not be any plans to support this in the future either?
Now that Trello is no more, can we get a roadmap for the future? My needs may be diverging from your plans so 'd rather know now and move to something better suited than wait for something I’m never going to get, does that make sense?
Pete, I’m mildly curious what your use case is for illuminated billboards. I agree about the self-shadowing issue though, I’d like to see a resolution for that one.
Here is a video a year ago to the day, I used an earlier version of Enscape, you will see light flickering and artifacts but you know what does work and now no longer works? face me, the dinosaurs seems to move with no shadow issues, it’s all face-me, the hosts on host tower not only are face-me components, that are also illuminated and guess what, they worked then, but no longer work, so I’m mystified by above comment that it’s not supported.
Did you use emmissive with the dinosaur cutouts?
yes, as you can clearly spot on the T-rex
So, as you can see this is a new issue, it DID work in the past, it WAS supported in previous versions, again, can we please fix this?
well i will be happy too , my workflow contains quite much face me objects …/trees , plants , etc/
btw : can u recall what version of enscape that was ?
@solo75287 , the shadow problem should’ve been persistent all throughout our previous releases as well and self-illumination should also not work on face-me/billboards, it’s not supported yet - is there any chance you could kindly send over the project which has been used for the video you’ve shared?
If that is not possible at all, maybe you could also share a further video created with our latest release, from the same project, to see if anything has changed.
I cannot share the model, I also cannot reproduce the exact animation as when this was done we only had limited animation options and Enscape does not save it’s settings with models and I do so many projects that if I was to save every Enscape setup for every project I’d have thousands of presets and that is just silly.
However, here are two tests, one is the face me dinosaur, it’s also an emitter in the original, material settings are exactly the same, but now it behaves completely different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=819TeJALi-4&feature=youtu.be
Now the hosts, this time I used a light and not emitting materials material, but the shadow bug appeared.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tma1VBpouug&feature=youtu.be
The Face-me object lighting not working is definitely a deal breaker for me. My entire workflow is based on face-me objects. If you are serious about supporting the 35 million sketchup users out there, you will need to give them a fix for this.
Thank you!
well said …
We work on fixing this. Emissive facemes should work then. They accidentally did in some previous versions.
and what about that not emissive ones , do they still contain that ugly shadow and will be stretched ?
Facemes are stretched? Never heard of that. They are not stretched in any way.
The shading issue will still remain, it’s very hard to solve if they should cast shadows on other things which is necessary to keep them from floating.
but why it is a problem to just tell that object dont cast a shadow ?
Hello Thomas, In review,
The Face-me objects contain two identical polygons, one that always faces the camera (texture mapped polygon), and one that always faces the sun (non visible polygon which creates the shadow). In the Sketchup renderer, the polygon which faces the camera does not accept shadows.
This technology has been used in games for many years. It allows the real time renderer the ability to display high levels of detail without having to create 3d polygonal objects (trees, bushes etc.) which slow down the renderer.
It is not perfect. But in many cases it works exceedingly well.
All of the trees, bushes and people in the image above were done with face-me objects. At the time this was done, about 7 years ago, this was running at about 10 frames per second in Sketchup. The only thing that is post processed in this image is the water in the foreground. Everything else is straight out of Sketchup. (including the sky and the aerial perspective, known as fog.)
I have thought for a long time that the fact that Face-me objects do not except shadows has been a limitation, but I am willing to live with this because the graphic horsepower that face-me objects provide is too good to be true.
As the Sketchup community starts to look at outside renderers such as Enscape, Lumion, Unreal etc. It is probably a good idea to look at the shadowing problem more closely.
In an ideal world! one could set the state of surfaces as to whether they could receive a shadow, or not,
without slowing down the real time renderer. At this point I believe most sketchup users simply want the shadow polygon to not self shadow the Face-me object (the textured polygon), but still cast a shadow on the surrounding world.
If this is simply done with emissivity, then that would be a quick solution! A very welcome solution, I might add.
However, I think the problem could be taken a step further, Where Face-me objects COULD receive shadows from the surrounding world, But NOT from it’s own shadow polygon. (and of course also still shadow the surrounding world)
I know that there is a tendency to think that a real time renderer should be all about 3d objects ONLY.
In the case of foreground specimen trees , it is desirable to have more sophisticated shadow interaction, including self shadowing. This can only be done with high quality 3d polygonal models. But for mid ground and background objects, in many cases, a flat “billboard” is sufficient.
In my view, Face-me objects are here to stay, enabling the artist incredible speed and exacting art direction in a light weight rendering technique.
Thank you for looking into this, it really means allot to the Sketchup community, who has invested deeply into entire libraries of face me objects for many years! (in my case over a decade)
great speech , brother !
