Hi Pilou,

> Damned now I must have some lessons with Vladimir Horowitz :)

One tricky part is timing the keys correctly with the mouse, you can't just hit the keys too fast!

I think I could get some more speed by doing some curve selections with a keyboard shortcut, but probably I should get back to work on MoI instead! :)

- Michael

I'll vote for that!
All this speed stuff just makes me feel bad ... like a retarded snail.
:)
eric

Ps 40 seconds new record ;)
but seems impossible to win again 10 seconds without new paradigm or new plugin!
The 5 separate constructions and pushing them individually are the obstacle!
And public want the new beta :D

Michael,

Congratulations on MOI. Its a great tool!

Tried the sketchup export in the beta and it worked fine but sketchy styles don't seem to render properly - the profile edges aren't rendered at all and you get a 'duplicate styles' message.

Tried Pilou's 3ds export->clean selection->soften edges approach and the sketchy styles in Sketchup rendered fine.

Hope this is an easy one to fix as the MOI->SU workflow is realy useful!

Simon

I must say that I love the SKP export its one of the reasons why I love to use Moi 3d.
But I run into some errors too and since the software is still in beta I want to post the problems that I run into ... !
like the surface of the mirrorholder is turned insed out and corners and edges with bevel that dont seem to come in
without problems

Hi rayman - can you please post a .3dm model file of your object so I can test with it over here?

You can also send it to me at moi@moi3d.com if you do not want to post it here.

It tends to be very difficult to try and debug a problem just given a picture, if you can send the actual model files that helps a lot.

The mirror holder part may be a bug in MoI that I can fix up, but the other problem where you are pointing the arrow to is an unfortunate problem built into SketchUp, which is that it will not allow any polygon smaller than 0.001 units in size.

Do you also happen to be using centimeters or millimeters as your unit system? That will also unfortunately increase the chance of running into that "small polygon" SketchUp problem since the 0.001 units is actually always measured in inches. If you use millimeters for your units then that means that any polygon less than 0.0254 millimeters will just be completely ignored by SketchUp, leaving those little holes.

I'm probably going to try to do a kind of "hole sealing" mechanism that will collapse any polygons in that size to try and partially help this issue, but that will tend to alter the shape in those areas a bit, so it will actually be better if you scale your objects up by 10 or 100 times, or use Meters units instead of centimeters or millimeters.

- Michael

How I miss this one, 22 sec here :P

Thank you Michael for the fast response. I tried to email you the file but the zip is 11 mb and the server said it was to large.
I thought it would be a size problem. I guess I have to model the things with other units for export to Sketchup.
I sent you a part of the model (mirrorholder) via email
Thanks
Peter

@ PaQ : Guiness Book reccord! :D

Hi Peter, thanks for sending it, I'll be testing that holder part to see what is happening there.

But yeah I see that your units are set to millimeters, so that makes you run into the problem where SketchUp just does not handle millimeters units very well since it discards any polygons smaller than 0.0254 millimeters in size (that is 0.001 inches in millimeters).

It's a pretty big limitation in SketchUp.... I mean it is very easy to get a polygon around 0.03 units in size when some rounded pieces like fillets get subdivided into polygons.


I'm not really exactly sure how to best deal with this problem.


Basically some choices are to either scale the model up in size automatically when you choose millimeters or centimeters as the units, or I can try to collapse small polygons down to kind of "seal off" those holes rather than having small polygons.

But neither one of these options is really that great - an automatic scaling factor will probably make people report it to me as a bug that their objects are getting scaled, and the "collapse holes" method will probably make for a rough shape in those fillets, making people report a bug that their smaller fillets do not look good.


Which method do you think would be better?


I guess I can preserve scale or I can preserve shape, but not both.


- Michael

Thank you Michael !Cant you make check boxes so the people can choose what way to export.
Thats just a thought.
I´ll be testing the sketchup exporter pretty much as I do lots of things in Sketchup.
Moi 3d is great for making props for it.
I didnt know about the size issue but now I know....

Hi Peter, by the way a quick method for you to get your object across now is to switch the units in MoI to Meters but while keeping your object fixed in its numeric size.

To do this, go to Options / General , then hit the "Unit options" button, and uncheck "Scale on unit system change".

Then you can close that sub-dialog and on the main Options / General dialog, switch Unit system: to "Meters".

That seems to fix up all the little pieces, leaving just the mirror holder being reversed.


Taking a closer look at the mirror holder - the problem there is that it is not a fully closed solid, there is a problem right at the top center part of it:



Zooming way in (with Zoom area is easiest) you can see there is a little tiny hole there:



It looks like your original revolve profile did not quite align all the way to the revolve axis, leaving a small hole after the revolve.

That makes that object an open surface instead of a closed solid and the direction on an open surface is not fixed to any one particular direction.

I do want to add in some tools for flipping open surfaces, but if you redo that piece to be a fully closed solid it should also solve that direction problem as well.

- Michael

Hi Peter,

> Cant you make check boxes so the people can choose what way to export.

It's possible to do that, but I still have to figure out which way is best by default...

Many people will not find those checkboxes so I'd like to pick a default behavior that would be the most expected one.

So the choice is would you be more surprised if your object came into SketchUp scaled up by 100 times in size, or if it came in with those little polygons collapsed down making kind of rough shaping in those areas?

I wish I did not have to choose either one of these, but I don't know of any way to turn off this "ignore small polygons" behavior in SketchUp unfortunately.

- Michael

Michael ! the scale can be corrected easier then a changed structure so i´d go for leaving the structure as dominant over size.
Plus get a checkbox with keep size.
Yes I see the problem now with the mirror I think I can redo that easily.
thanks for the help !
Peter

Hi Peter, I figure what I will do is if you have units set to cm or mm then I will switch to meters units instead, as that makes the cutoff size in SketchUp to be 0.0000254 units which is way way harder to hit than the 0.0254 size that you get with millimeters.

In addition to that I'll also try to add in a "hole collapsing" mechanism as well though, to try and seal off things that are just going to end up as holes otherwise.

I'll also add a switch to turn off the change to meters, at first this will go in the moi.ini file and if it comes up more often that people need to turn it on or off I'll add a checkbox in the Options dialog later.

- Michael

Hi Simon, thanks for reporting this SketchUp issue with sketchy styles.

> Tried the sketchup export in the beta and it worked fine
> but sketchy styles don't seem to render properly - the
> profile edges aren't rendered at all and you get a
> 'duplicate styles' message.

I think I've got the "no profiles" part figured out - I was setting a "hidden" flag on edges which should not be set to allow profiles to show up.

You might be able to fix this while inside of SketchUp - if you can manage to select all edges (I don't know if there is an easy way to do this in SketchUp, but probably some way), then go to "Entity Info", and uncheck the "Hidden" checkbox.

That should make your profiles show up in a normal way.

I'll update the next MoI beta to do this automatically when exporting.


The "duplicate styles" message does not seem to do any actual harm, but I will try to figure out what is involved in removing that, maybe it does not like that I have not set any materials or stuff like that on the objects.

- Michael

Michael,

Thanks for responding so quickly.

By selecting all in Sketchup then hiding and unhiding and then selecting all again and smoothing I can get the sketchy edges to render.

One other problem is the holes on the test piece aren't rendering the sketchy edges - presumably because the edges are too short for the style but if I select all the short edges that form the circular profiles for the holes and weld (weld.rb) them into polylines, they will render.

Not sure if this is fixable in the export or not?

Simon

Hi Simon,

> By selecting all in Sketchup then hiding and unhiding and
> then selecting all again and smoothing I can get the sketchy
> edges to render.

That should get you going for the moment, but for the next beta I have fixed this up so that it will not be necessary to do these extra steps.


> One other problem is the holes on the test piece aren't
> rendering the sketchy edges - presumably because the edges
> are too short for the style

Yeah, I noticed this happening on some styles myself as well.

However, if you zoom in so that the edges are a bit larger on the screen then the rendering seems to kick in.

As far as I can tell it is a limitation in some of those styles that they do not work well on edges that are only a small size on the screen, once you zoom in and the edges take up more space on the screen they start to work. Is that the same thing that you are seeing?


> Not sure if this is fixable in the export or not?

It does not seem to be particularly easy to tweak from the export side, since it is dependent on how big your final shape is going to be on the screen in SketchUp.

If I just duplicated all possible things into additional polylines, that would probably lead to stacked up or doubled drawing in some instances as well... At least that is my initial worry about it.

If the sketch style in SketchUp is just not set up to do rounded things, I'm not sure what I can really do about that from my side. Maybe it is possible to tweak some of the properties of those styles in SketchUp to enable them to work on small edges, or you may need to ask the SketchUp developers to update that style engine to work more automatically on a kind of longer "chain" of edges more automatically rather than on a sort of more individual little edge at a time...

- Michael

Hi Michael,

When a curve is formed from 'joined-up' edges in Sketchup the rendering seems fine. Although there is a lower limit on size it seems quite small. But generally it will do curves and rounded things fine.

I think the styles are built up from a series of different sized images. It may be that using the Sketchup Style-builder you can extend a style to add an extra small size image to the series of images to cope with small disconnected edges being used to describe curves.

Is there any way to force the geometry on export/import to mimic how Sketchup is representing the curves when they're created in Sketchup natively?

Simon