Hi, I am an interior designer and I would love a plugin that would let me apply a mirror material into a model, but in doing so give it reflective properties live in the model… without rendering.
My bad, thought some render tools could help out untill i noticed the “without render” part.
Would be a nice feature indeed, untill then i will keep rendering with the Rayscaper and/or the discontinued TwilightRender tools.
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Unfortunately, without a rendering engine, that kind of property in SketchUp is a lot of number crunching for an app that, as a rule, runs pretty lean.
Outside of rendering, and with the lack of what you’re looking for in the Extension Warehouse, your best bet is to “fake it till you make it” or more like “fake it until the extension you’re looking for gets made.”
It’s an older tutorial, but everything still works as described.
Similarly, if you’re exporting static screenshots, you can always do some photomanipulation.
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This is not something an extension (or plugin) would do. It would be a feature of SketchUp’s internal rendering pipeline.
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This idea would require two major changes to SketchUp’s graphics engine:
- A ray tracing algorithm. That is the only way to figure out what should be reflected in the mirror. Ray tracing is computationally expensive, and would have a huge impact on SketchUp’s responsiveness.
- A concept of reflective materials. SketchUp’s existing graphics has no support for reflective properties (hasn’t needed them because it doesn’t do reflections).
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