Scene

SketchUp Scene Tutorial

Required programs:

SketchUp example room

After creating your room import the example room and centre it (simplest way is to draw a line from corner to corner along the Bottom of it, and then lining up the centre of that line to the axis) this is important as the example floor nodes will only be useable within the space of the floor of the room, there are no wall nodes only floor nodes. Now position your room over it (may be useful to have x-ray in view ticked) and position your mesh as to make best use of the floor nodes. Delete the example room and save and export your room mesh as though it where a normal furniture mesh now

Load up the previewer, derive from item 10860 and then as you would normally load in the mesh and its textures. Once there done bring up the folder you saved the example room in, in there there's a file called MaxRoomNodes.xsf, copy it and past it into where you exported your mesh to. Now back in the previewer, in the special tab click on browse and click on the MaxRoomNodes.xsf and now apply changes (if you do it before now you may have noticed your room load on its side, this will correct that). The .xsf file holds not only seating info (as mentioned in the seating tut) but all nodes, camera lighting, seating, floor, ect. Now click on browse again, this time right click the MaxRoomNodes.xsf and select open, in the box that appears click to select from a list and use notepad to open it. One thing to note right now is where it says on the second line NUMBONES="159" , as this at the end will need increasing, adding on the number of seats you have added, but we will get to that later. Press ctrl+f (this will save us some time) and find NAME="seat01.Standing", hopefully by now you will have read thru the seating tut so you will know how to move and add more seats to your scene (its the same as I explained in that tut). Only difference now is that there is 2 seating positions already hear for us, we can forget about the catcher and pitcher if we wish (those as where we move to during hugging movements and anything that takes 2 people) as there is already a default placing in the room for them and they are the correct distance apart and in the right direction.

If you wish you can move those 2 nodes around the room, when making a 3rd + seating nodes (which we all will want that's why where reading this) copy one of them and increment the numbers as per usual in the seating tut BUT the ID must be ID="159", this is because the floor nodes are numbers 3-158 already, so your 3rd position will be an id of 159 your 4th seating position will be 160 5th 161 and so on as per usual and finally at the top where it says NUMBONES="159" make sure you increase the number to the same as the final seating node you add (Extra floor nodes can be added exactly the same way as seating nodes into this file, just harder to guess where there going)

And that's pretty much it really, adding the MaxRoomNodes.xsf , making sure the first position node you add starts at 159 and goes up from there and increasing the numbones= at the very top and saving

problems I have come across is everything disappearing, this is coursed by miss numbering ID's, go thru all you added to make sure there all unique and follow one after the other, if there's a gap it can mess things up, if 2 are the same number only 1 seat will show

Removing Useless polygons

This is very useful for rooms and furniture when you want one side of something to be see thru and not need to use opacity (as I'm sure you have noticed when you look thru opacity materials it makes other opacity materials in the scene disappear) so lets make that material disappear instead.
To start with when making the scene make every texture you want taken away invisible (some do this to the entire scene before texturing begins to make things simpler, but at any point is fine) and label it anything you wish just remember its name. After completing you scene in SketchUp and exporting it and importing to the previewer take note as to what M0 number the material is you wish to delete. Now copy the scene original .XMF file and open it up in notepad. At this point its useful to take note of where it says <MESH NUMSUBMESH="7"> (the 7 being any number, usually the same as or move than the number of texture you have in your scene) as with every section we are going to delete you will need to keep count and then remove that number from the MESH NUMSUBMESH number. Now press CTRL+F this will bring up the search box and put in MATERIAL="0" Changing the 0 to the mesh number your looking for (if you want M01 put in 1, M02 put in 2, M12 put in 12) and click find. Now to delete that material we need to delete everything starting just before where it says <SUBMESH NUMVERTICES= , from the beginning of there right down to the end of where it says </SUBMESH>. Now search again for the exact same material up and down as sometimes there's more than 1 following the same thing again, deleting from the beginning of <MESH NUM to after </SUBMESH>. Once all the materials are removed that you do not want, lower the <MESH NUMSUBMESH= by the amount of mesh sections you have just removed, now each mesh section you have removed has left a gap in the numbering system, which ever number you removed we need to change the last ones to fill those places, for example if you had 7 submesh and removed number 4 we now change the submesh number to 6 and change MATERIAL="7" to MATERIAL="4", if you removed more than one you start with the end number and work your way backwards, it is very useful to use the replace all tool in notepad to make sure you get them all changes from one number to the other.
Now save and load it into the previewer, sounds complicated but once you get the hang of it, its simple ^_^. If it doesn't work start again re-copying the original before you start again.

-Good luck all :)

(Material removing tut made with info thanks to ISAWHIM ^_^ )

Adding an Omni directional
light source

Adding a light source makes your scenes more realistic as it makes avi's in them appear more 3D by giving them a bit of shadow shading.

To add one simply copy and past this into your XRF file changing the ID to match where its placed, its position can also be moved as though it where a seating node (if you want it in a specific area its a good idea to position a seating node where you want it and copying the seating node's position to this one)

** This info was provided by groovyloopylou , BIG thanks to her ^_^ **

-Happy to accept gifts of what you made to NEO1471 if you found this helpful ^_^