Background Positioning

Hey Al:

I just downloaded V4..........the background positioning wizard is not there as you show it in your tutorial. Am I missing something here?

Thanks,

Chris

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Permalink Reply by Boothy on September 28, 2011 at 6:46am

Morning Al

I mean having a tonal operater in the NXT image editor which will allow post render (when render is totally complete) from an NXTimage file. I am not sure how you will do this- I really mean a tonal channel for background. Its OK tweaking background image before render but the initial few passes do not really give an accurate idea of finished lighting levels and therefore you will really have to complete render before tweaking brightness\contrast and then render again - very hard to match pre render. Ideally I would prefer a situation where there was a separate tonal operater for background which could be tweaked in tandem with lighting channels. Possibly a material channel which would allow HSL tweaking of finished image would suffice.

A dotted horizontal line showing current eyeline so you could allign background image is all that is needed I think.

When you proposed the tonal change for background I was not quite sure how this would work but thought it would occur post render - so we might have had our wires crossed - still good but would be much better if it could be tweaked after render to suit final image.

Thanks a demanding customer

Boothy

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Permalink Reply by Boothy on September 28, 2011 at 1:42pm

You can crudely adjust post render by applying self glow to window glass to lighten and use the luminance slider to darken in material channels.

Boothy

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Permalink Reply by Boothy on September 28, 2011 at 2:16pm

On the following image I used the mirror default setting on the window glass with 75% transparency - apart from a slight extending of image the background is starting to look quite good in relation to scene.

Boothy

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Permalink Reply by Alain Bonnefoy on September 29, 2011 at 10:00am

And

1- Boothy talk about an integrated "background positioning" wizard in sketchup ??!!?? unfortunately I also have a 64 bits machine. Do we have chance to get it working ? because that's sure it could be very very very helpfull despite I don't see how it could works!

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Permalink Reply by Boothy on September 29, 2011 at 12:01pm

Hi Alain

I think Rich is still working on this issue - if you still want to use background wizard just render your image with 1 pass and use the background wizard in the render window setup dialog it works fine outside SU.

Boothy

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on September 29, 2011 at 5:39pm

we just uploaded a new version which should work from SketchUp on 64-bit machines (we hope !)

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Permalink Reply by Alain Bonnefoy on September 30, 2011 at 12:01am

Ok,

I still have the problem with nxt libraries: hdri image selection still says it's not installed!

Alain

[ I sm moving this to a new thread - Al]

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Permalink Reply by Boothy on September 30, 2011 at 1:42am

Hi Al \Rich

The dialog now opens fully on my 64 bit office machine - it also closes without bugsplat.

Unfortunately :-

1. You cannot see image (see image below) due to windows being occluded (the background wizard works fine post render in render window).

2. If you close back wizard in SU and reopen the wizard straight away the dialodgpresumes that no image is loaded and you have to reload image via browser although the previous image has not been cleared.

Thanks

Boothy

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on September 30, 2011 at 7:27am

Our "trick" for making Alpha Images from SketchUp is to change the background color to RGB(255, 203,7), save the image, and then make any pixels which are that color transparent. So any window which is not 100% transparent, is treated as opaque.

I can save a second image with the background color set to a different value, then by comparing colors in the two images, and pixel with a different color in the two images is being seen through a window, and I will make it not fully transparent, so you can see through it. By making the background white in the second example, I can even pick up the tint in the window.

Let me give it a try.

Boothy said:

1. You cannot see image (see image below) due to windows being occluded (the background wizard works fine post render in render window).

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Permalink Reply by Boothy on September 30, 2011 at 7:57am

The window seems to work ok in render dialog the `yellow occlusion` only occurs in SU

I will try the 32 bit version later

Boothy

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on September 30, 2011 at 8:14am

Yes - the transparency in IRender nXt works well with windows.

Here are the results from the "two image" alpha in SketchUp:

SketchUp model with yellow window

(I am a little color blind, so I like dramatic colors when testing)

Alpha Image from SketchUp placed in front of a background:

You can see that we were able tint the windows and make it partially transparent.

(Plus we were able to make Susan walk on water)

I did this in RpTools to improve it's save SketchUp Image as Alpha feature, I'll pass it on to Rich later today for inclusion in the background wizard.