Google SketchUp to Maxwell Render Workflow Tutorials
Plug-in Workflow Introduction / Components & Instances
Subtitles of the Movie (Google SketchUp to Maxwell Render Workflow / Plug-in Workflow Introduction / Components & Instances)
Continuing along with this concept of how SketchUp and Maxwell integrate through the plug-in, one of the areas where things are going to get kind of squirrely is the idea of Components in SketchUp and Instances in Maxwell. And the reason why I say that is because there seemed to be on the surface a very similar type of thing, a Component in SketchUp is something where you can have one piece of geometry repeated over over again or even embedded within other Components and it can be a means of saving memory and not having as much geometry that's real in the scene. And Instances are a lot like that in Maxwell, they're a great means of saving on memory, however the fundamental rules of how Components work and how Instances work are very different. And the reason why is because Instances in Maxwell need one actual physical piece of geometry that's somewhere in the model to define the basis for all the Instances that will follow. Whereas Components are kept completely separate and sort of a Component definition that doesn't necessarily even need to necessarily even be in the model anywhere it can just be completely separate, stored as a Component definition but never actually make an appearance in the model. So let me go ahead and give you an example of how that might work. So we go up to Components and here we're in Models, so I'm just going to go over to Components and I'm just going to load something like say this Arroway Wall, alright just drop that somewhere doesn't matter. So there it is, it's a Component, it's in our Model right? Well if I delete that, it's no longer in the Model; nowhere in the Model, you don't see that piece of geometry anywhere right? Well, here's the problem with that, is if we go up to Components and we go back to In Model you'll see that that Component definition is still sitting there in our SketchUp Model and it will always be there until you go Purge unused, well this can be useful in certain circumstances, however Maxwell doesn't have any functionality like that, it doesn't have a Instance Definition type thing that's separate from the model, it only knows what's in the model. So Instances are based on physical geometry that's in the model and Components don't necessarily have to be in the model. Now why is that so important? Well, if you're just exporting straight from SketchUp to Render then it's really not that important, however if you're exporting from SketchUp to be using the models in Maxwell Studio then you're going to notice a very strong difference between the way that the two programs approach how to organize and structure your geometry, and it can be very confusing if you don't understand the Instances and Components. Now, if you want to know more about the actual logic that defines how these Components are organized then I highly recommend that you read the SketchUp Plug-in Manual right here at this link and he goes into at the end of the manual, he goes into great detail as to how the logical structure of those things would occur. Now granted the logic isn't always infallible and sometimes weird things happen, this is the reason why we the SketchUp forum on the Maxwell forums so you can go and report bugs and JD can't hunt the stuff down and take care of it. Now the other instance of something that is very different from SketchUp to Maxwell is this Layer concept and this is the reason why I have this out here is because in SketchUp Layers are a means of controlling the visibility of an object but when a document is exported from SketchUp to Maxwell especially in Studio, Layers don't serve that same function so instead in Studio JD has enabled the Layers of being a Grouping function, very similar to creating Groups and Components and Nested Groups of Components, in SketchUp everything that's on one layer will be in its own Layer Grouping in Studio. Now, like I say until you open Studio and work with it and we'll get to that later, you won't understand what I'm talking about but, I wanted to point this out to you because if you go and you start creating geometry without following through with this video and you say, OK, I'm going to go ahead and open this in Studio and do x, y and z to it, well great except for the fact that when you open it in Studio you may not see anything that resembles anything like your SketchUp model. And I wanted you to understand the reasons why that is. Now, we'll go into different ways of getting around those problems later in this video series but I didn't want you to get too far ahead of me and then wonder what's going on and why things aren't working right, well they really are working right, you're just not necessarily understanding the way that they're designed to work.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Google SketchUp to Maxwell Render Workflow |
| Author: | Jason Maranto |
| SKU: | 34210 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-83-6 |
| Release Date: | 2011-03-22 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 82 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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