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Hi Adrian,

That sounds very strange – I don’t think we’ve seen anything like that before. Could you post a screenshot showing how the dialog appears for you?

Also, please could you let us know the exact versions of Shaderlight, SketchUp and operating system that you’re using? That would help us try and set up a matching system to see if we can reproduce the problem.

Many thanks, and sorry for the difficulties!

Shaderlight support

Thank you for the quick reply.
I’ve attached a screenshot of the render toolbox.
The Lighting ‘Image’ window (greyed out) has an image search button that highlights when I hover the mouse on it, but nothing happens when I click it.

In my attempt to find a toolbox that’s not broken just now I tried opening several drawings and they were all broken, including a new blank file.
Then I thought to close Sketchup and re-open it by clicking on a finished file instead of opening it within Sketchup and all the tools display normally.

So,it seems to be a problem caused by opening a file via an open instance of Sketchup.
That may explain why I seemed to be running into the issue randomly.

I have Shaderlight version 2017(5.0.0) 64 bit which seems to be paired with Sketchup V15, so I’m keeping that version on my computer just for doing renderings.
Computer is a Lenovo Ideapad with Windows 10 pro, I7 - 7500U CPU (2.7~2.9GHz)
Nvidia 940MX graphics card.

Hi Adrian,

Ah – that does actually look like an issue that has been reported by other users before, but that we’ve never been able to reproduce here. Thank you for the extra details – we’ll give it a go and see if we can get any further.

I hope you can continue to make progress using your work-around of opening files directly for the time being?

Regards,
Shaderlight support

Yes, it helps with the workaround. When I started this thread I didn’t know about that so you’ve already helped in a way.
I hope you can track down the issue - I’m wondering if it lies within Sketchup though. When I have time I’ll try re-installing and see if that helps.

Thanks for helping.

Adrian

There was one more thing, which may help you pinpoint the problem.
When I was trying to work with it broken, I found it really difficult to make changes to lighting levels stick.
They kept reverting back when I started the render again. in the end the only way to make it stick was to click onto another field and try to change that - then the first change stayed changed.

When it’s working normally I can click anywhere to set the change.

Adrian

Hi Adrian,

Sorry it took a bit of time to put together a system that appears to match your setup. We have now tried out the steps you described above, but unfortunately we still don’t see the problem, which suggests there might be some other, unknown, difference between your setup and ours.

We did fix a number of issues with dialog layout in Shaderlight 2020 (v8.0) – would you be willing to give that a go to see if your problem was addressed with that update? You should be able to get a free trial at the downloads page. If it won’t give you a free trial (which can happen if you’ve already signed up for a free trial for a given release), please contact us at and we’ll arrange a new trial for you.

If you do try v8, I would recommend only working on test files, or backup copies, to make sure that your files still work properly if and when you go back to v5.

Sorry about the ongoing problems – we really would like to get to the bottom of this issue!

Regards,
Shaderlight support