I’m not in the SketchUp Team team, but, work as a local reseller and trainer in Latvia.
Right now I’m looking at what point I can max out Visualizer drawn geometry limit for larger exterior scenes, with a lot of vegetation.
I don’t see Visualizer as much of a competition for V-ray, as the feature set does not even come close.
The problem with V-ray has been that it took a very long time to develop something like V-ray Vison, so a lot of architects I know started to use Enscape, Lumion and Twinmotion. And still, to use these tools you need a quite good pc and buy the license.
Why I’m so exited about Visualizer is because it is something I always envisioned a good SketchUp model viewer for desktop, mobile and VR could be - easy to use, not too demanding and gives great, real time results.
Works real time and you can create simple camera animations - movement is quite linear
The Unity 3D engine can support quite a lot of features, including artificial lights. But not in Visualizer.
Understand that us, SketchUp users, have been a small edge case of people who actually use it, so there has not been much demand for more advanced features.
I really hope they’re trying to push Visualizer on the Web.
One of the very robust advantages of using Unity is that you compile once and deploy to all the platform supported (Win, Mac, iOS, Android, webGL)
This is the result of vegetation test:
The polygon limit for such a large scene with a lot of trees was around 5-10 million. Started with something like 148 million and came down to that
The problem with billboard trees is that you get too heavy reflections. 3D trees show some weird shimmering. When camera is oriented parallel to water, you get some jumping lights.
In a sense, LayOut is a presentation tool with some ‘Project’ features like adding notes and markups, rectangles and circles, annotations and dimensions. You can open viewports of different models, but only one at the time.
Trimble Connect for Windows is a Project tool with presentation features. You can even view multiple models in the same viewport.
But the markups and annotations lack the more adjustable way you can do them like in LayOut.
For MacOS compatibility, Adam Billyard’s Light-Up is a plugin for in-window rendering in Sketchup Pro. It’s not specifically a ray-tracer, but gives good results quickly and you can fly or walk the camera around in the rendered view to get just the viewpoint you want, or render out a movie. Small projects render from “0” to a few seconds. Larger projects can be rendered quickly, then given a final render with increased resolution when your lighting is as you want it. Handles IES files for realistic lights.I’ve been using it for years with photo match to prepare lighted installations of art glass for the artist’s sales presentation if customers request it. It answers the question, “How would that look?” before buyers commit to an expensive commission.
I have the exact same result! Frustrating as I have Pro so should be able to use this. Would be a game changer for my presentations. Not sure the Visualiser actually installs correctly?
Hopefully someone will work this out…
Sorry, I didn’t mean that - I meant that it’s something the SketchUp team should be producing, not your good self!
As Architects earn quite a lot, the license and high spec PC aren’t a problem - it’s time. I tried V-Ray and found it to be a little too time intense, while Enscape was incredibly easy and provided the desired result. Having to learn things while active projects pile up, isn’t an appealing situation.
With the increased cost of SketchUp, it would be nice to get something in return, such as a visualizer, even if it is low quality. If clients are impressed and happy with the results, that app will be pushed and if it fails, an alternative would be used.
It’s very weird, it appears in the installed list of programmes, but like you say in your other comment, it either doesn’t have any GUI effect (loading window) or it appears briefly. I’m personally using an up-to-date install of Windows 10.
Did you install the ‘host’ app first and run it?
The visualiser is an add-on and the button might only appear when you have loaded a model from an existing project.
After you launch and Sign In to Trimble Connect on your browser using your Trimble ID, head over to the top right corner and click on the ‘Applications’ grid-like button:
Well done for this, I’m fairly certain this is one of the procedures I used with no success. I would encourage others to try these instructions though, and ideally report back.
Sorry, lost me a bit? Is there another app to download as well a trim con & visualiser app? I have loaded a pre published model into TC but still no ‘send to vis’ icon.
What you’re saying makes sense as vis just doesn’t seem to want to install. On one opening of model in TC the icon flashed up for a nono second & then disappeared again.
