How does Trimble Connect Visualizer know what to visualize?

SketchUp Pro
1

Hi - I’m trying to work out how to use the Skatter extension from Lindalë with the Trimble Connect Visualizer, and I can’t quite figure out how the visualizer decides what objects to render.

(There’s an argument I should be using V-Ray or Enscape, but the Trimble Connect Visualizer is good enough for what I need.)

My PC is nowhere near powerful enough to have the Skatter elements visible in my model, but I’m struggling to work out how to hide them for editing, yet have them appear in the Visualizer.

From what I can work out, things will be rendered if they are: ‘visible’ in Outliner ‘visible’ in Tags.

So I can have Skatter elements hidden in my model but appearing in my render, by putting them in a tags folder, making them ‘visible’, but making the folder not-visible.

However, I have some geolocation content that doesn’t seem to follow those rules - it gets rendered regardless…

Question 1: Can anyone point me to a resource that describes exactly what is supposed to be rendered when you run the Visualizer?

Question 2: If I select ‘render only’ in Skatter (which I have to do because my PC isn’t powerful enough) then objects don’t get rendered in Trimble Connect Visualizer. Is there an easy workaround to make this happen? I think it works properly with V-Ray or Enscape, obviously.

I might also post Q2 in the Lindalë forums.

Thank you for getting this far!

2

TCV is not a rendering tool like Vray or enscape.

it takes your sketchup file, then converts it in Trimbim format. there are things that don’t get converted well.

like that. the sketchup file knows that you have hidden stuff that’ll need to be rendered. but it will be converted into a trimbim as it is. so off course the trimbim file is missing the skatter elements…

it’s quite low tech and basic, anything more complex will require a true renderer.

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Thank you, and sorry for the slow reply.

I guess that’s what I’m asking: How does SketchUp know what hidden stuff to render?

If I know that, then I can apply it manually to Skatter elements and get the result I want…

5

hard to say. @TheCGO was / is in charge (?) of that but it hasn’t evolved much in a year.

from my use, I’d say that if it’s visible in SU it’ll be visible in TCV. but it’s hard to say how extension-generated content will behave.

6

Still around, we are doing improvements to TCV, and have rewritten the UX system to future proof it. I have spent all of my spare time with AI in the last 15 months or so, once our new build pipeline is up and running, we will start updating TCV for SU again.

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