After X years doing VERY complicated things, I still run in circles with these situations / division

[Voicefromwithin]

Hello
I may have been at this subject before. I need to cut my water level along the BIG circle but simply cant. I obtained it by “intersect with model” of my rather large building.
I can’t have the water show through the building!
Because when I want to chose the face/space within the circle I can’t select it at all.
Ok there were columns and glass walls all around.
I erased it all one by one. I can cut a small circle around my tiny cross lines that tell me where
the center is.
I have cleaned out I HOPE 100% of anything that was left of any kind of many an edges.
Still I can’t delete the big water circle.
I can do any other circle within it …but that won’t help me. I have tried to cut out like a pizza in half and sliced NOTHING will divide the space from the entire lake surface.
I just remain baffled of how stupid this makes me feel after so many years on SKU.
Ignore any shapes/ line at the bottom of this water 7m deep it’s like a pool/lake

I have these bi city panoramas around the lake. They are imported the wall is 100% vertical
from a pulled up square and still when I export to Lumion10 parts of the pic disappear
now at a late stage before I never had an issue. But the file seems to be like possessed
by dividing the picture into triangles across the while width. Sometimes two or more so I select all of them and make the picture into group, Never had that issues before trying to divide the model
To make sure it’s vertical I slide up the screen along 4 square columns at the corner and give the picture back glass and then another wall of glass 10 cm away
I have made this a separate file, like a darkroom to import again with the water
as my water that never was an issue since day one showed these huge sways of
black shadows in the rendering. Although I have no waves, the water has always been
clear pool water as flat as possible even in the render.
I have been blocked now for over a month. I have a new PC with 128GB of RAM but the same graphic card.
This resolved the issue on stalling with a “mip error” but since then my file import
in FBX ended up disastrous. Always some panorama missing, many wrong materials,
one time metal just like leaked across about many glass materials in the entire game building
I keep going back and forth.
Dividing, re-importing, reassembling takes so muc time and only then at the end I always to find something off odd or missing that looked perfect in SKU… Lately like a miracle the side walks of parts of my streets above turned transparent
letting the day light into the underground what I do not want.
So I switched back to COLLADA format but still get mistakes.
It’s been a month from hell on how to get my file to display for render and movies as well as it did before I always ended up ecstatic especially about the Lumion10 water outcome now its a big
issue that I actually want to import the water only separately but for that is need to slide around the building and not flood the center .
So now I separated ALL actors people, plants and the volume cut our of the land
with the hope to import the building naked from all what slows down a file to load like (700 people + cars trees rocks fountains

But to export to UE 54 I need FBX files I started to import FBX into UE and gosh knows where
they stand up vertical and won’t let me select them to rotate them parallel to the ground
and I did NO click on triangulate all files and did NO check “FORCE X to the front”

The only time (the first time) I managed to import horizontal to unite floor and square I would not let me chose the two items and move them into position it’s like they were poison to my mouse? Can[t get the gyzmo or pivot to make the actors move accordingly.

Thank you so much to the good souls who understand the frustration of being alone in front of a project and no one to talk to. Merci, Muchas Gracias always gratfull

I am really VERY bad at the hardware. My SO installed it all I just want to know anyone
would a better graphic card help my bizarre issues.
Before I only have loading issues with this PC SKU19 seems to have issues

exporting
the files as they are? Could it be the GPU?
But I don’t know will another Graphic card fit this PC we are on a serious budget!

[rwamoore]

I really don’t think it’s your graphics card. Design and rendering softwares take years to master, maybe stop switching around and spend some more time learning just one?

Much of what you are describing sounds like group and component nesting problems, materials being applied to multiple levels of nesting. Your circle problem sound like a basic modelling issue, again maybe related to nesting levels?

Anyway I don’t think you will get much help with such a long post, maybe try asking a more specific single question, and posting your model will also help people help you.

Good luck!

[ArchyVR]

Hello @Voicefromwithin,

It’s not clear to me exactly what you are trying to achieve, but in this case using intersect to cut the geometry you want to cut seems to have left many artifacts floating around and that might be what is causing the problems.

I’d suggest to simply draw the rectangular volume, place some circles and then move and scale them to align to the model and then delete/apply materials to faces as needed.

Below is a variation of that, although I think I may have inverted what you want as water versus land.

Note I use Enscape for my renderings.

[Voicefromwithin]

Thank you very much… for not “telling me off”

I will try once more to extrapolate my water square.
I am just so scared not to be able to reset it 100% exact into position.

You are so lucky to have a live connection to the render.

With SKU19 (that I keep due to budget) I can’t get the “Datasmith live bridge”
to work with UE therefor I can’t just make all show up in there.

That would be a dream, but I need to get into UE for the final target
to make it into a VR game on Steam. ( one can have a dream ?
I have test walked some areas already

I the moment my model is already like a the main cabinet
with the water area and surrounding frame that holds it pulled out like a drawer
now I will pull out part of the drawer.
Do you recommend my water to have a thickness?
My water is only once face to which I apply water material top and bottom.
I so appreciate you not sending me grazing (like we say in French)
Thank you so much

I never had issues with water. In the center of the circle I actually have another water body.
that holds a promenade around it and a tropical aquarium with simulated corals elevator
and swimming fish.
It’s all super complicated to divide.
Yes the “intersect” left a army of edges of the support structures. I thought I have cleaned up most if not all.
Does the circle have to be totally void 100% of any of these possible tiny remnants?

I try to keep the center point at least with a tiny circle to recreate the big one again.
That worked for most of the small circles.

If you look at the 8 smaller circles to the right I had no issues but with the one at 9pm position
although three others had exact the same layout left over.
They are the intersections of a the engine of a ROCKET standing in the lake.1

It’s so nice to always being helped by helpers like yourself.
Thank you again. I really appreciate it.
Regards
Vic

[Voicefromwithin]

Thank you for taking the time to write your advise.

I have posted many times here and always got help. Sorry for the lengthy post I just get carried away late a night. I have several people who did help me resolving several issues at the same time I am very confident about the support of this Forum for many years

I guess you may see that I do quite OK with SU for decades (but I stay with SU19)

It depends what and how one works. I worked as professional interiors and fashion designer for over 30 years then 17 years ago I fell in love with 3D. I create as I go like a painting.

And yes, I here I got here several slaps on my mouse for having a model that is nearly 2GB. haha. But I can’t go back and planning things I didn’t know I was going to create.
Currently I am working on, dismantling my as advised, it into more easier manageable parts because SK19 and UE does not work with the live “Datasmith” to migrate to UE.
(A very steep learning curve)
During this process I hit roadblocks that I are just tricky as this circle problem that won’t open as I need it to.
“Nesting” I will try to read about it
I am in this active plane I just wonder why for example the y circles to the right were easy to delete of water and the one at “9pm” positions would not although others looked exact the same

There isn’t much that stops me but there are sometimes these situations that arise that’s when I ask for help.
I NEED to work/ learn UE because my building need to become a space for a game. It’s a simple as that. If I had known years ago what I was going to do now I would have started with UE at that time.
I never had water issues before as I explained. I have designed many landscapes and pools (actually one of my favorite subjects) but I never had to cut a huge hole into my water surface.
Here is just one finished example of loads of pools ponds and water that I entered into an international design contest for “render of non build projects” just for my satisfaction as it was my Covid project.

“Stiletto On Destination Peninsula” By #vstarchitecture Visual Senses Design...

My model is way to big to upload here and I have been working on it for two + years to create a VR game. I test walked with VR VIVE many areas already.
I simply just can’t give away my model for anyone to take it.
(It’s my baby destined for a potential Steam release)

OK I am not the youngest and have ADHD (under med control), but the older I get sometimes I just loose the north. That’s when I come cry for help.

Thank you again cheers

Vic

PS: Very nice backyard and deck designs!

You may be interested to look at
#polycam https://poly.cam/
A very affordable 3D scanning app for phones so you can scan the existing structures with your phone and import to your computer to work with.

It works very nicely with hard structures, foliage etc

[Voicefromwithin]

I managed to cut out the faces in all the circles.

Thank you so much YOU made my day big time!

[ArchyVR]

You are welcome and I’m glad you were able to figure it out.

Thanks for the tips on scanning and also happy you like my deck design.

Regarding your initial problem, I’m guessing there may have either been hidden geometry, lines out of plane, or lines not connecting leaving open loops due to the intersect command not executing properly, preventing you from modeling things the way you wanted.

I’ve noticed the intersect command does not do well with highly oblique angled faces as well as small detailed geometry which many times does not create a clean intersections forcing me to clean things up manually, or as I mentioned, just modeling the result directly without using the intersect command.

One trick that might help in the future, is to scale up the geometry 100x… do the intersection and then scale back down 0.01x. I noticed this trick also helps with small objects with circles and arcs, where SketchUp claims the geometry is too small to draw the arc or circle in the first place with the number of segments selected. This trick also works with components, where you can have the small component placed correctly, and then off to the side, you have the same component scaled up 10x or 100x, where you can do whatever you need to do to it, which updates the correctly scaled smaller version of the component without any problems.

Good luck with your Steam project. It looks pretty cool overall.

[Voicefromwithin]

The concept beach house in Costa Rica is VERY me…:-).
I am scared scaling up geometry 100x my model is already 2GB

Also once more the same question.
Would you recommend large scale water surfaces
To be one single layer or give it some thickness like you did word your demo?

Yahoo Mail: Search, Organize, Conquer

[ateliernab]

@Voicefromwithin

I am scared scaling up geometry 100x my model is already 2GB

scale of geometry has little to no impact on file size. quantity of geometry and materials do.

[Anssi]

I wonder how you are thinking a 2GB model can be part of a 3D realtime game. Think about how it can be navigated presently in SketchUp. It won’t become any faster in a game engine.

[rwamoore]

2GB model! Have you purged unused in the model info recently?

[ArchyVR]

As for the water and whether or not you model it as a volume or as a plane.

This all depends on what you are looking for in the end.

For an ocean or lake, I think in general it might be best to simply model the water surface that you see, and then model the container that holds the water as a separate group with it’s own materials applied.

If you want to model the water as a volume, like trying to illustrate red wine in a clear wine glass, then model the volume in 3d, but depending on your rendering software, you may need to scale the liquid wine down to 0.99x of the container so that you don’t get two faces on the exact same plane. This is to avoid a flicker effect that can happen in Sketchup as well as in Enscape in my case as you move around.

[Voicefromwithin]

Hello Thank you
WOW you are like a professor.
Your first suggestion is what I have always done in this model.
Like a gigantic swimming pool with tiles as the bottom that just reflect as blue
to to the 7m depth.
I want potential guest/gamers to be able to look through whats at the bottom like the glass maze.
The water is contained like in a box made of four panoramas.
Unfortunately lately there always seems to be a problem with one or the other missing even
I build them into a b

ox with a thickness of 10cm (considering the span is 50M across)
Before that a missing panorama became nearly a daily problem.

I have worked days on end to make sure the walls are 100% vertical/perpendicular to the floor
yes if you look at the dots, ONE (not the others ) wants to divide into two diagonally
I wish I could just send you that file of the box and water.
You may have noticed I usually name my files here, with the potential problem or question
One gets so engrossed into a project maybe I am missing the obvious.
I so dream of having a creative partner in my project.
But who wants to work with a 55+ creative
The youngsters all only want to play shoot and kill games
I have over 1000 renders of my entire world.

[Voicefromwithin]

Hello
Yes I have.

[Voicefromwithin]

Hello.
Thank you for your concern, very kind of you.

My game is NOT based on speed at all. There will be no shooting no killing
It’s a very intricate world for guest/gamers to move about to find and meet in special ways.
loads of tight spaces stairs elevators etc.

I can fly through it in SketchUP no problem what so ever at the roll of my wheel mouse
I can dive in around and out and above also in Lumion the render.
I only encounter major problems with the FBX files
changing/switching or omitting x faces
I only can get it to UE as FBX even divided in pieces
I just don’t know why the arrive with the XYZ being horizontal
and I can’t move, rotate they are like frozen at arrival

I never ever had or look or save my model in that position. NEVER EVER
and I have NOT forced the Y forward in the FBX options.

My Lumion only gets slower with all the people, cars, plants, trees and
many custom graphics
But I do have a clean version with no props and actors as at the end
the gamers are supposed to fill the space
Here is my items slowing down the Lumion but they are NOT inside SketchUP

Thank you very much

[Voicefromwithin]

Hello

Sorry for disturbing and asking advice again.
I have now managed to unite my bottom box and top building
but the result in Lumion10 are just awfull so many tries
exporting from SKU 19 as Collada and FBX formats
Both constantly give me different materials and faces etc…
I just am soo frustrated I can’t get the look from before on my old PC…

I am looking at trying (for free) ENSCAPE as you said you use it
…Would you say it is better than Lumion?
Some Youtuber who made comparison sets it on top with Corona (which I never heard of)

I am trying now to see if I can merge my new bottom to the previous top in Lumion
never done it before so wish me luck…
FBX export takes forever many hours (due to the size of my file) but it’s like a jackpot
one time it misses all these face (mainly jpgs) then the other it misses a lot of lettering in volumes
like logo on a building etc…
I have tried TWINmotion its really leaves me deflated

[ArchyVR]

Hello again,

I have not tried the other alternatives to Enscape. For the size models I do Enscape has been fantastic. I deal with single family homes with file sizes that range between 30 and 100 MB. Your mega project is a at least one or two orders of magnitude larger and thus needs serious considerations of how best to work with and what best methods to output for users.

I’m just an architect, but it seems to me you need something that supports massive environments that can load portions within a certain range of what is visible to the user to best utilize the computer resources available the way video games such as Grand Theft Auto do.

Unreal Engine comes to mind or maybe Unity. I’ve never personally used these, but hopefully this leads you in the right direction for your needs. Maybe reach out to forums on Reddit that focus on Game Creation to see what the State of the Art is and find out what people are using the most.

If you stay with SketchUp and give Enscape a try, focus on optimizing your 3d environment in every way possible.

1. Reduce entity poly counts to the bare minimum needed. Objects that are only viewed from far away such as the top of a tall building can probably be very low poly towards the top, and higher where users might get close. There are Plugins that may help you with this, or you can export to MeshLab and try optimizing models there.
2. Use the Material Resizer Plugin to control the image data within your materials. Again consider if users will be able to get close to the surface or not and reduce the images to the bare minimum needed.
3. Use components for duplicate objects.
4. Use proxy models. Enscape has a library of its own models you can use. In SketchUp you will see a simplified proxy model, but when you render in Enscape, a highly detailed model will appear. Note you probably cannot export the Enscape models to use in other software.

Good Luck!

[Voicefromwithin]

Thank you very kindly for taking the time.
Yes all my work is to lead to move it all to Unreal Engine
I have been silent because my SKU became slower and slower
and my imports even in newly created layers came across as super heavy
compared to visually much bigger files before.
So I went back systematically to see till what previous “saved version” I can get so feel
some improvement in speed
this took me to this file that when I clicked on hidden geometry
held hundreds of “guid lined” into the infinity. This took me many weeks ultra frustrating
but I could not reassemble anything withou my Lumion nearly frrezing like
30seconds waiting for a click action to appear on screen…

I imagine they may have happen when at an earlier stage I pulled/moved by
accident something out of my model into the infinity as a “SKU splat” happened
When I reopened the recovered file there was like an arrow that was made of one of my
modules that went on into the infinity.
I spend hours deleting line by line and corrected the origin.
Today I was cleaning tiny specs here and there that create these irrational super big
groups that seem to go on for ever…my main model being 50x50x50m Its the blue amalgam towards the left. Response

time has drastically improved but I want all the extensive groups of nothing gone. I have gone through the process to purge but it does seem to snatch tiny lines or specks of something,

I very much appreciate you having taken your quality time…to try to help and you have you saved me on multiple occasions like with the holes i needed to cut into my lake water …
I am lost for words. I pushed “explode” and hope to get to delete each one by one
i SEE nothing at first and I have VERY good eyesight and normally see one pixel on my 4K screen
but this is beyond me.
I think its my punishment for creating floors or part of floors just next to my model
and then moving them into it into final position ( I did that because before importing anything took for ever . Now have plenty of Memory but still the old graphic card due to my tight budget…
THis is my setup but I am NOT a hardware person. My SO is and said he did all he could
more can’t be done on this PC due to the motherboard and CPU and Graphic card.

I eliminated my main central building trying to reimport layer per layer very cumbersome
althoug all parts come the same model the XYZ never seems to match…

Ill keep you posted if I overcome my endeavour .
Sincerely
Vic

[ArchyVR]

One last thought to help with work flow…

If you are not already doing so, you may want to create block-by-block groups and assign each one it’s own layer so you can turn most of the world environment off while you are working on a particular section.

You can take this a step further and make each group it’s own component, then right click on the component and “save as” saving it as a grid coordinate address, such as B4, or D7…

From there you can then work on each component block SketchUp file independently, and then “Reload” the components in the master assembly SketchUp file. This process may also help when exporting to Unreal Engine, since you could export each individual SketchUp Component from its base skp file, versus exporting from a huge master file.

As for aligning your XYZ coordinate outputs, I’m assuming there should be a setting for maintaining the origin.

If not, you could make a 3d crosshair group on its own layer and placed at your origin or floating above it so it’s always visible if geometry is in the way, and include that in every section of your model you export so you can easily use the crosshair to realign each group in Unreal Engine.