SU Podium V2.5 Plus. Super charged processing scenes and other new features. 1. What is SU Podium V2.5 Plus. 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. In fact, V2.5.5 is up to 50% faster than the blazing speeds of V2.5. What is processing scenes and why should I care? Please read here. Panoramic VR is now supported in SU Podium V2.5. Please read about Panoramic VR here. Panorama Server, where you can upload your equirectangular images and have them converted to Panoramas on a cloud, for free and easily share to any device. Read here. Improved Generate Script with relative file paths so you can send to another computer for rendering (V2.5.5 or higher only. Read more about the specific of V2.5.5 here. 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 files and has much fewer unknown symbol messages. Also, the problems with materials that has names like h or m are gone. V2.5 Plus has a better Tools, Analyse method, helping you to quickly identify problems. PIE has a new DOF feature. Section Tools has been included in the SketchUp 2015 and 2016 64 bit versions. 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, please read here. V2.5 Plus supports SketchUp 2016, 2015, 2014 Win/ Mac, 64/ 32 bit. However, V2.5.5 does not support SU 2014. If you are using SU 2014 please use V2.5.1. If you are using SketchUp 8, please use V2 Plus. For Windows, currently requires Window 7,8 and 10 and 32/ 64 bit. Upgrade toV2.5 Plus is a very low cost currently. Buy here. V2 Plus will continue to be available for SketchUp 8. 2. Upgrade to SU Podium V2.5 Plus for SU 2016, 2015 or 2014. Upgrade here If you are a SU Podium v2 or V2 Plus customer, upgrade for currently a very low price of $39.95. Please read below about the improvements you will obtain for this low cost. V2.5 customers - your upgrade to V2.5.5 is free. SU Podium V2.5.x requires a new license code that is different from V2 or V2 Plus. For existing V2 or V2 Plus users, you will need your V2 license code to upgrade to V2.5.x. Please see here. Uninstall SU Podium V2 or V2 Plus before installing V2.5.x. We recommend that you use our Windows and Mac uninstall programs. Read the install guide here. Where to get support - use the Forum. 3. Processing Scenes - super fast C++ method. SU Podium V2.5 Plus employs a significantly improved Podium Exporter that is written in C. 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. In many cases 10 times faster. In fact, V2.5.1 is 50% faster than V2.5. 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. 4. Flipped textures and other material problems that are fixed. Flipped component textures problem - fixed. See here for bug description. Tiff files crashing the Mac version - fixed. See here for the problem description. Material that are named m or b or other single letters. See here for the problem description. Other UV mapping problems - mostly fixed. Unknown symbol message - much fewer incidents. 5. 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. 6. 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. Read about all the features of Podium Tools here. 7. Rendering Sections including in SU 2015 and SU 2016, 64 bit versions. 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 and 2016, 64 bit. This is because SketchUp 2015/ 2016, 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/ 2016, 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.
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