SU Podium V2.5 Plus
Super charged processing scenes and other new features
1. What is SU Podium V2.5 Plus?
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V2.5 Plus's major new feature is the result of months of R&D to employ a C++ method of processing scenes which make the overall Podium processing scenes in SketchUp up to ten times faster. In larger models, you will notice even more speed gains. What is processing scenes and why should I care?
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V2.5 Plus solves many of the texture mapping distortion in a rendered image such as distorted textures on flipped components. Also, it is able to process .tif files and has much fewer "unknown symbol" messages. Also, the problems with materials that has names like "h" or "m" are gone.
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V2.5 Plus has a better Tools, Analyse method, helping you to quickly identify problems.
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PIE has a new DOF feature
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Section Tools has been included in the SketchUp 2015 version.
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All other SU Podium V2 Plus features are retained. For a summary of V2 Plus features in addition to the new items in V2.5 Plus.
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V2.5 Plus supports SketchUp 2015 ad 2014 Win/ Mac, 64/ 32 bit. If you are using SketchUp 8, please use V2 Plus.
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For Windows, currently requires Window 7 or 8 and 32/ 64 bit.
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Upgrade toV2.5 Plus is a very low cost currently.
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V2 Plus will continue to be available for SketchUp 8.
2. Processing Scenes - super fast C++ method
Previous versions used a very efficient ruby code to export SketchUp geometry, textures, camera and sun position to Podium's raytracing engine. However, the C++ Podium Exporter can export geometry and materials to the raytracing engine much faster. Nearly 10 times faster. As you know, with large models, processing and parsing scenes can often be the longest stage in the entire rendering process. So for large models, the speed difference can be several minutes or more in rendering time.
For example:
This Lake House model from has 768,000 faces and 145 materials. On a very fast Windows 7 machine (Intel i7 4960X), with V2.18.972, processing scenes and parsing UV maps took 12 minutes. On the same computer with V2.5.x the geometry and materials exports took 43 seconds. We expect this speed performance will increase even more in the next free update.
3. Flipped textures and other material problems that are fixed
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Flipped component textures problem - fixed.
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Tiff files crashing the Mac version - fixed.
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Material that are named "m" or "b" or other single letters.
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Other UV mapping problems - mostly fixed.
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Unknown symbol message - much fewer incidents.
4. Podium Image Editor Improvement - DOF change
Podium Image Editor has an improved DOF (Depth of Field options) that lets you fine tune the in focus and out of focus areas.
5. Tools Analyse updated
Tools has been updated in V2.5 Plus additional Analyse Tools options providing more information about your model and how to fix problems.
You can see in the above images, there are many new items reported in Analyse. Now there is a summary section for Alerts which provide information why Podium may be crashing or is not rendering as expected. The list of materials now links with both the SketchUp Materials Editor and the Podium Materials Property. In other words, when you click on one of the listed materials in the Analyse Report the particular material is linked to SketchUp's Material Editor and Podium Material Properties UI so you can make edits quickly.
6. Rendering Sections including in SU 2015 version
An often requested feature for SU Podium has been to support SketchUp sections. SketchUp sections simulate section cuts by hiding parts of the model that are behind the SketchUp section plane. But SketchUp does not actually trim or cut the faces from the model, to make sections as you might see in a solid modeling 3D program. SketchUp section feature does not remove geometry behind the section plane. Therefore Podium's rendering engine can not distinguish between what is in front or behind (hidden) the SketchUp section plane.
To deal with this, Cadalog has a has a new section tool plug-in for SU Podium V2.5 Plus users, that cuts and removes the SketchUp geometry that is behind the section plane. To ensure that you do not lose geometry from your original model, the SU Podium Section Tool first makes a copy of your model and renames to a unique name. Then the tool creates a new face where the section plane is and removes the geometry that is behind the section plane. The result is a real physical section which you can then render with SU Podium.
Section Tool is now installed with V2.5 Plus for SketchUp 2015 64 bit. This is because SketchUp 2015 64 bit has improvements in memory management and Section Tools works well. However, we have not included Section Tools in SketchUp 2014 or in SketchUp 2015 32 bit because it will often crash due to lack of memory. However, 2014 customers will be able to download it from the SU Podium plugins page.
7. Support for more languages.
SU Podium V2.5 Plus adds support for more languages in the SketchUp 2014 version as well as the SketchUp 2015 version. First non-English language supported is Japanese with more European and Asian languages coming.
8. All other SU Podium V2 Plus features.
SU Podium V2.5 Plus retains all other V2 Plus features that were introduced one year ago. For a summary of what other features are included, such as Podium Image Editor, Podium Preset Editor, the new advanced metallic materials, EditInPlace, hidden LEM
9. Panoramic VR
Panoramic VR has been introduced with SU Podium V2.5.1. SU Podium includes an option to create equirectangular images and convert these into spherical Panoramic VRs where the camera is inside the sphere and can be rotate on it's axis in 360 degrees by your clients. Creates a powerful presentation.
10. No shadow Cast option
Cast Shadows is a new material property. There may be times that you do not want a specific material to cast a shadow. One example shown below is Podium Browser's background clouds. At times the cloud background image needs to be scaled up to produce a realistic effect. But this will cause the cloud background image to cast a shadow over much of the scene. In this case, you may want to turn off the material property, cast shadows.
11. Numerous v2.5.00x bug fixes.
A numbe of bug fixes have been included in V2.5.1.