Proxies for SketchUp

hi

might be a stupid question - can we use our own proxies inside sketchup?

sketchup gets quite slow when using a lot of geomerty. right now i use octane render, and it’s nice proxy feature, and it would be nice to have something similar with enscape :slight_smile:

thanks

jorgensen

Nothing yet, I am hoping that Enscape can work with Skatter and use their proxy’s

I totally agree - Sketchup really bogs down when you start adding complicated tree models, and being able to use proxies is key. I’m not a fan of the totally blank boxes V-ray and others use by default however. Having at least a face-me billboard representation to approximate the look and size of vegetation makes it less of a guessing game with what the final product will look like. (here are some I created awhile back for Thea Render: https://thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=93&t=17550) This would be very similar to the way vegetation works in Revit currently. It would be great if Enscape had a library of trees to choose from that one could drag into sketchup as face-me proxies - but also the ability to bring in your own Sketchup or obj. tree models and turn them into proxies as well.

The current SketchUp alpha already supports billboards and we will probably add Scatter support in a future version.

A vegetation library is not yet planned but we’re opened to support other kind of proxy solutions (like Scatter).

Excuse my ignorance, what do you mean by billboards?

Face-me components are often called “billboard” components as well.

I hope this answered your question.

Thanks Thomas, regular billboard support is definitely handy, but primarily just for still images I’d imagine. It would be nice if there were a way to access all the same trees and plants that come with Revit (and show up in 3d within Enscape replaced by your models). The problem is Sketchup doesn’t have a standard library of trees the way Revit does. Revit uses ArchVision content I believe - would the same work with Sketchup assuming we have an ArchVision license?

Luckily there are already a lot of 3d Sketchup plant models out there that are pretty decent, and using those seems to work quite well now in Enscape. They’re not always the most optimized models, but from the tests I’ve done, the performance is still quite good even on hi-poly models, see attached.

I’m still dreaming of the day we have access to this level of quality though :wink:

The thing is that many power users already have libraries of trees from various companies, I have several Evermotion bundles and Xfrog libraries that have been made into proxy’s to work with Thea and Vray, so if there was a way Enscape can create a proxy creation system that would be marvelous, and be able to skatter them would be even better,

i agree with solo - we don’t need another library (at least i don’t) - but the ability to create our own.

jorgensen

Maybe something that would help while we don’t have proxies, would be the ability to hide layers in sketchup but to choose them to be renderable in enscape…

It could be as simple as Enscape supporting the Ghost Component plugin. http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=21469 The plugin converts a model to a simple box and lets you toggle back and forth between the ghost (proxy) and the component. It’s simply a viewport performance issue with high poly models. I’d be happy with just a very simple…show the box in Sketchup, but render the model in Enscape. We could then utilize plugins like Skatter, Canvas, Raytracer Spraycan, Component Array, etc. The work is already done for placing the models…we just need the switcharoo.

Finally downloaded the Skatter demo and it’s great! It would be awesome if Enscape had support for it. And would it be possible to support V-ray and Thea proxies? That would require reading their model files though - not sure if that’s doable.

@solo75287 @TowerPower

Anyone there who wants to test the experimental Skatter support?

Hell yes!

@Simon_Weinberger sure!

i def would like to

Absolutely, bring it on.

I am a Skatter owner and would love to test as well.

I would be glad to test it out as well!

oh my! this is exciting indeed! if you need more people to test on please consider me as well! :wink: :smiley: