First Try with Trimble Connect and Visualizer

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I decided to try out Visualizer this morning. Thanks to @Speaker for the video tutorial it was pretty simple. For an interior that looks like it was lit with a single bare bulb, little time invested and little input from me, I guess it’s not too bad.

It would be nice to be able to control the field of view. This leans a bit too much toward the fisheye end for my taste. And it would be nice to soften the shadows. This was with Shadow Sharpness set to 0, AO intensity and AO radius set to their max values. maybe at some point an option to include more than one light source will come along although I expect I could do something in post to deal with that.

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Adding the impression of a second light wasn’t difficult but still…

At this point I would stick to a standard rendering application for serious renders but for quick, this is hard to beat.

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Shadow sharpness works the other way around - you need to increase the value to 7. You can override to to even bigger value too

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Ah… that’s not very intuitive. I see it works as you say. Thank you.

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I wouldn’t use too large values for interior scenes. I try to keep it below 30%.
AO really works well to bring out the folds in all drapery

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Agreed! Yesterday I got a chance to talk with SketchUp Team, and this is the 1st improvement I said I would like to see - match the FOV of your set up SketchUp scenes and even possibly synchronize with SketchUp for real-time camera movement.
Right now the FOV in TCV is set at 60 degrees, that is very close to human perception, but is not good for tight spaces. FOV and camera matching is essential for any mixed style renderings, that I usually create.

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I am happy to announce that we now have an extension created for the Visualizer which allows you to launch it directly from SketchUp! This is possible due to the fact that SketchUp 2023 now supports the native format of Trimble Connect (TrimBIM). The FOV and camera position is synchronized from SketchUp to TCV, Enjoy.

https://extensions.sketchup.com/extension/eff2be10-f1b8-49b0-ab12-3d368e0a42dc/trimble-connect-visualizer

This is the Windows version of the extension, but we do have a Mac version ready for publishing if there is interest.

Kim Nyberg
Senior Technology Director, Trimble

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