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

Hi Simon,

> 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 that the best result would be if the SketchUp display engine automatically chained together a series of small edges like this into a larger "logical edge" so that it could get that improved display without any extra work-arounds...

Have you been able to contact the SketchUp developers to ask that they improve their display engine to do this?


> 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?

It is possible for me to emit polylines in addition to the edges, but I would worry that it would create a kind of "doubled rendering" effect if I just simply duplicated all edges of a model with additional longer polylines.

It is hard to figure out a way to only target just some edges, because the ones that would need it depend on your screen size and zoom factor while in SketchUp, just trying to duplicate only edges that are of a certain fixed absolute size would probably not get it right all the time.

Because it is based on display screen size, it would work better if it was covered better by that styles engine directly inside of SketchUp rather than by trying to hack around limitations...

- Michael

Hi Simon, also one other thing,

> When a curve is formed from 'joined-up' edges in
> Sketchup the rendering seems fine.

Even without doing that, the stylized edges should show up when you zoom in on them a bit.

Do you see that happen?

Edges that are large enough on the screen at your current zoom level and view angle should show up already without doing any extra processing on them.

It just seems to be a limitation of the "sketchy styles" engine that it does not really like to have small edges, it would probably work better if they could automatically join together a series of small edges around a surface boundary if they find that they are too small to show up in the regular rendering.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Yes I do see the short edges get rendered when I zoom in but it makes the render look quite 'bitty' especially when you animate some sketchup scenes as detail appears and disappears.

There is a 'dropout length' specified for these sketchy styles when you build a style in Stylebuilder that is suposed to govern whether an attempt is made to render the edges or not. Also you can define a set of strokes 16px, 32px etc for the style. I'm going to try and create a custom style to see if it will render the smaller edges better without having to worry about them being polylines or having to weld them together.

I undestand the difficulty with duplicate polylines also. Maybe its worth a test if it doesn't take much effort and include it as an option - but as you've said, how do you decide which edges to chain together on export!

I haven't contacted the sketchup engineers yet - their front door isn't obvious to find, despite it being Google! Also, I don't expect I'll get the kind of service that you give. Very personable, very quick and very good! This isn't an MOI problem its a problem with how Sketchup handles imported meshes/geometry when rendering with these type of styles.

I'll keep trying a few things and update you if I have any luck. I do like that sketchy render look for concept stuff and artwork and haven't been that satisfied with C4D's Sketch and Toon or Rhino's Penguin. I'm going to look at Brazil for Rhino also as that has a toon feature. Perhaps you could include a sketchy renderer in MOI 3 then I wouldn't have to leave the confines of MOI ... now that would be great!

Anyway, once again thanks for you help, much appreciated!

Simon

Hi Simon, I am definitely interested in doing a sketch style render directly in MoI in the future sometime, that kind of a style is a fun way to present your model!

But it will probably be a fair ways out before I'll be able to focus time on that area. It is really hard at this point to guess at a timeline for it.


> Maybe its worth a test if it doesn't take much effort and
> include it as an option - but as you've said, how do you decide
> which edges to chain together on export!

Could you please post a sample simple .3dm file of something that you wish worked better?

That would let me try doing some tests and let me send back the experimental .skp to you to see if it does what you need better.

It may be possible for me to do something like emit one extra polyline for every edge in the MoI model which may do what you need, or at least get closer. I did a very quick initial test of it and it seems to be better for sketchy styles, but it will probably have to be an optional thing that you enable because it looks like some of the extra polylines created in this way can kind of remain stuck in their original positions when you try to do certain push/pulls of the model. But it does not seem to cause duplicate rendering issues so much which I thought would be a bad problem.

- Michael