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Thank you for your post, this does sound very strange as the SketchUp textures are all setup with the correct bump map. Could you email support@artvps.com with an example scene and we can have a look at what is going on.

Hi,
I have the same problem - whatever I do, bump doesn´t work at all.
Beside my privat licence on my own computer, I (we) use 3 licences on
3 diferent computers in the company where I work. The same SkUp-model
doesn´t show any bump on any computer. And it makes no difference whether
I use my own materials and textures or if I use some of the few good
SkUp-materials.
I always thought that I’m doing something wrong ...

I have not yet understood (after weeks of using Shaderlight !)if bump is
only possible in connection with SketchUp-materials or if bump also works
with own materials and textures ?????? - there are absolutely no visible
results! - what a pity!

greetings, Egie

Hi Martin and Shaderlight-Team
Here I show screenshots with a SketchUp-material and an own homemade texture-material. As you can see, the bump-settings have no effect in both cases.

SketchUp itself only has few useful materials. - So, anyone who wants to make good renderings,  has to use custom textures. How does it work? Do I have to prepare textures in Photoshop - with its own bumpmap on a separate PSD layer? - please tell me the secret :)) !  Do only work certain image formats like PNG, Tiff, BMP,PSD, ... ?

Or must there be any certain computer settings? As I’ve mentioned, bump in Shaderlight does not work - not on 4 different computers and 4 different Shaderlight-licenses.

It has become very urgent for me, that I might increase the quality of materials in my renderings.

If there is a Shaderlight-user who has found a solution, he is welcome to give us a counsel

I would love to find a solution to this problem soon

greetings, EGIE

Hello,

The bump on materials doesn’t actually apply a texture to the finish, it applies an effect that can be seen with lighting highlights and reflections. Below is a screenshot of a material cube I have created and the only lights in the scene are spotlights to highlight the bump effect.

The left side of the cube are custom materials and the right side are SketchUp materials. All of the materials are set to a bump value of a maximum of 4.

If this light was shining directly on to the surfaces the effect would not be as obvious, and this can be hard to see using a less direct lighting effect.

I hope this makes sense.

Hi martin, first of all thank you for your kind support - great! :)

Unfortunately your comment does not make much sense to me. These textures work very well in all other renderers like Cinema or ArtLantis and of course with every kind of light. It would be a loss if bump would work only with spotlight - don´t you think so?
Shaderlight is a great tool!! - Most of all so easy to use, compared to the other tools I use.
And I can´t use it like I would do because of this “bump-bug”.
I do not come forward. Is there any workflow to work up own materials as I asked in my previous post: formats, greyscale vs RGB or CMYK, or 16bit vs 24bit, or are there any certain settings to be done in SketchUp? ... - Anything I need to know?
I have copied your little scene - unfortunately again without success. Your materials are great - Where’s the (or my) error?

Greetings, Egie

The Shaderlight bump maps work the same as bump maps in most other renderers, so they should work with all kinds of light.  However with very non-directional lighting as in some of the lighting presets the effect might be so subtle as to be unnoticeable.

I’d personally try with a few different lighting settings, to see if the effect becomes more obvious.

Hi,

I also stumbled on something strange here.

Apparently the SU materials from a downloaded model render fine, but the SU materials that I add to it don’t.

I downloaded this model
https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model.html?id=825c925f072a0cbe80c9aad333dfd5d

The wooden deck has the SU material “Wood_Floor_Light”, with SL material set to AUTO and BUMP+1.
It renders with this wet look. (Not entirely sure why that is)

Then I added the the same SU material to a part of the deck, (but now straight from the materials menu), with the same material settings, but that doesn’t show any of those reflections nor bump.

What am I missing here?

Hi Slevin,

This appears to be a problem that was introduced with the SketchUp 2016 update. Shaderlight uses the material name to find the appropriate settings for the ‘Auto’ material type and those names were changed in SketchUp 2016 - underscores in the names were replaced with spaces. This means that Shaderlight doesn’t recognise the built-in materials anymore, and therefore renders them as default ‘matte’ materials.

Because the model you downloaded from the 3D Warehouse was built in an earlier version of SketchUp, it uses the underscored names that Shaderlight recognises, so the wooden deck gets the shiny look. You are presumably using SketchUp 2016, and the version of Wood Floor Light you applied is not recognised. You can get the ‘auto’ enhanced material settings back by changing the name of the material you added to ‘Wood_Floor_Light’ - i.e. replace spaces with underscores. The same applies to most other built-in SketchUp materials. I haven’t been through every SketchUp material to check, so there may be some where more than just spaces were changed in the name. If you come across any that still don’t work, let us know and we’ll check how the material name changed between SketchUp 2015 and 2016.

Incidentally, I believe the shiny look is meant to represent a polished varnish finish to the wood. I agree it looks rather ‘wet’ in the context of pool decking, an effect that is intensified at grazing angles. Polished wood might be considered a bit of a slip hazard next to a pool, so a non-auto ‘Glossy’ setting might be more appropriate in any case.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but hopefully renaming the materials will help you work around the problem until we can issue a fix.

Regards,
Shaderlight support

Good to know!
That solved it indeed

Just 2 more things:

1. is there a way to save these settings, or do I need to change the texture names with every new model?

2. Are the best render results achieved with the standard SU materials, or can all reflection/refraction/bump/etc settings also be achieved in the SL material editor? And in that case: is there documentation on what settings SL uses for all SU materials?

Hi Slevin,

1) Unfortunately I don’t think there is a way to change the texture names permanently. Having said that, the names come from SketchUp, so there might be a way that I’m not aware of.

2) Shaderlight has built-in enhancements to the standard SketchUp materials that make use of some internal features of the renderer that aren’t exposed in the material editor. So if SketchUp has a standard material suitable for your model, it is likely to render more realistically with the ‘Auto’ setting in Shaderlight, which enables these enhanced materials.

Regards,
Shaderlight support

Alright thanks!

A quick update on this topic: We released Shaderlight 2017 today, and it includes a fix for the problem where Shaderlight’s automatic material enhancements weren’t being applied for models created in SketchUp 2016 or later.

Regards,
Shaderlight support

So SL2017 solves the problem of having to rename the materials every time in SU2016?

In order to decide whether it’s worth upgrading from SL2016, I just have a couple of questions:
- Are there any other updates planned?
- Do the soft shadows also work with IES lights?

Thanks
Joachim

Hello Joachim,

Yes, Shaderlight 2017 solves the material renaming issue in SketchUp 2016.

We do have many more features planned for the Shaderlight 2017 series, which will be free updates for anyone with a 2017 licence.

Soft shadows don’t currently work with IES lights, because the IES profiles themselves can contain their own specification of the luminaire size and shape – we’re still working on finding the right way to handle the various possible settings. I have to be careful not to promise anything that isn’t finished yet, but soft shadows for IES lights is on the list of things we would like to add in a future Shaderlight 2017 update.

Regards,
Shaderlight support