Material problems

Hi,

Recently I've been starting to get some very weird behaviour in Sketchup regarding materials. They seem to have started around LB24 although I wasn't really paying attention.

In particular I have a material which is supposed to be transparent glass. When rendering, it renders correctly, but in Sketchup I get issues like thew attached image (brown shower door).

Note that this screen-shot was taken with LB27 but I have noticed similar behaviour in LB24, except there it is rendered in white.

Any idea what's going on? Is this an iRender issue or a sketchup issue?

I should mention that when I go to edit the "ShowerDoor" material it has settings as you would expect (see second attachment).

Hmmmm, interesting... when I go and inspect the material, the material rendering in SU seems to come good. Very weird...

Any ideas? As I said, actual rendered images are perfect, but it is a bit off-putting to see a material rendered incorrectly in SU

cheers!

-rs

Attachments:

28 Feb 2012 9-52-20 PM.png, 190 KB
28 Feb 2012 11-13-03 PM.png, 12 KB

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Permalink Reply by Randy S on February 28, 2012 at 5:33am

A bit more on the strange material things I'm seeing...

Here's a picture from SU of a wall that has been tiled (under Advanced settings of a material)

And here it is rendered:

Prior to applying the Tile settings in the Advanced material wizard, the colour of this wall in SU more or less matched the rendering. But as you can see above, it is now just gray.

Is this what you would expect?

cheers

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on February 29, 2012 at 10:27am

I'm trying to duplicate this, but cannot. I tried editing the shower door and tile materials as you described, using the Bathroom 18 model that you had sent us, but the SketchUp display doesn't change for me.

Is there any chance that you can repeat this in a small model, and then send us a copy of the model before this happens, and another after it happens? Along with the steps you did in editing the materials?

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Permalink Reply by Richcat on February 29, 2012 at 10:50am

Rich

I tried last night, and there is something wrong with the Advanced material colour properties.

I did a simple tiled cube with 255 RGB colours, applied the tile option in material tree in advance options and it changed to 178 RGB.

Then went back to sketchup, and IRender edit material window and if you click the RGB settings arrows or just click on them here and there they vary all over the place, and in differnet RGB windows. The arrows don't give you much change only 177 to 179. Using the sketchup entity edit window they change ok and you can set them back to 255, and the slider lines under the colours do not move or can not be moved.

Its seems fine in normal IRender edit material and advanced mode, it just seems to be when you add a material in the tree.

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on February 29, 2012 at 2:32pm

At first I couldn't duplicate it, but all of a sudden I can...I've got a grey cube and can't change the color after adding a Tile to the tree.

I'll see what's going on.

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on February 29, 2012 at 3:21pm

It looks like this is the way the software has always worked. I'll install a version from a few months ago and see if that is true and post another reply.

Here's what's going on though:

We try not to change a SketchUp material that is already on a face, except for the color and transparency. If you have used the Advanced editor to edit the material, we get the new color by getting the Base color of the ArMaterial (material from the Advanced Editor).

In the case where the material started life as a SketchUp color material, and then you change it to be an ArMaterial Tile, there is no Base Color to get. Tiles can be complex and don't have a base color. So we apply the Grey that we get when we ask for the Base Color of the new ArMaterial. We should't do that. We should notice that it's a Tile, and therefore has no base color, and just leave the original SketchUp material color alone.

In thre case where you place a material on a face using our material dialog, we know it is one of our materials and go ahead and remake the texture that you see in SketchUp whenever you edit that material.

We probably need a button where you can specify that you want us to remake a SketchUp material so that it looks like the ArMaterial.

Richcat, the reason the color arrows don't work any more is that once you've made the material a tile, it's the base color is always grey, so we reset it to gray as you try to change it. THere is a little rounding error there, so you see 178-179.

We'll revisit this logic and see what we need to do. It may be that we need to have a setting that says that you always want us to remake the SketchUp texture to match the ArMaterial appearance, as close as we can (obviously we cannot accurately create a matching repeatible wood or granite texture from a procedural material.)

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on February 29, 2012 at 4:10pm

I went back and installed the version from May 4, 2011. Same thing.

I made a red box, then edited it's material and made it a Tile in the Advanced Editor, and it turned the box grey in SketchUp. It rendered as the red tile that I made.

We'll fix this, and then decide if we need to add functionality to remake the existing SketchUp material.

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Permalink Reply by Randy S on February 29, 2012 at 6:23pm

Hi Rich,

The behaviour is fairly random. And as I stated previously, it seems to fix itself if I go into the IRender Material dlg (don't even have to change anything in the dlg, just open it) so I'm not too concerned. Having said this, if you would like me to upload the latest rev of my bathroom model, I am more then happy to do so.

-rs

Rich Hart said:

I'm trying to duplicate this, but cannot. I tried editing the shower door and tile materials as you described, using the Bathroom 18 model that you had sent us, but the SketchUp display doesn't change for me.

Is there any chance that you can repeat this in a small model, and then send us a copy of the model before this happens, and another after it happens? Along with the steps you did in editing the materials?

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on February 29, 2012 at 6:28pm

No, I think I see the problem. Did you read what I wrote about tiled materials in my 2 posts above?

Randy S said:

Hi Rich,

The behaviour is fairly random. And as I stated previously, it seems to fix itself if I go into the IRender Material dlg (don't even have to change anything in the dlg, just open it) so I'm not too concerned. Having said this, if you would like me to upload the latest rev of my bathroom model, I am more then happy to do so.

-rs

Rich Hart said:

I'm trying to duplicate this, but cannot. I tried editing the shower door and tile materials as you described, using the Bathroom 18 model that you had sent us, but the SketchUp display doesn't change for me.

Is there any chance that you can repeat this in a small model, and then send us a copy of the model before this happens, and another after it happens? Along with the steps you did in editing the materials?

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Permalink Reply by Randy S on February 29, 2012 at 8:06pm

Hi again,

Yes I did, but I would say they are two separate issues from the looks of things. I had initially lumped them together as a "material" issue. The behaviour I see in the tiles is exactly as you describe. But the ShowerDoor is not tiled. It is the only place where I am getting weird SU colours (see the attachments on my initial post).

Did I miss something?