[Plugin] Bitmap To Mesh

[TaffGoch]

I can attest to the "recommendation" to keep the image/bitmap SMALL!

You would, generally, think that 512x512 pixels is "small." It is NOT !

It will take many hours, or (if you don't have enough memory) it will choke SketchUp.

Pay heed to the advice. This 512x512 DEM image, for example, is NOT SMALL:

[thomthom]

You would, generally, think that 512x512 pixels is "small." It is NOT !

Yea, I did the same thing while I wrote this plugin. Tested with what I thought a was a small sample. x_X

Got some ideas for warnings for large bitmaps. And options to sample only portion of the map - like taking a max number of rows for x and y.

[Mistro11]

Just want to share my first serious experiment with this plugin here. I love working with greyscale height maps.

I'm experimenting with terrain and water. Both the terrain and the water meshes were done with this plugin. Please excuse the terrain as I didn't smooth them, but this is mainly a water test anyway.

River2.jpg

watertest7.jpg

watertest9.jpg

Details of this experiment can be read in a thread I started in the newbie section
viewtopic.php?f=79&t=49668&p=447473#p447473

Thanks again ThomThom!!! You rock with this great plugin.

[thomthom]

The water is a mesh as well? o_O wow! that must be a heavy model! :s
Why not do the water as a bump map or displacement map? (since you're rendering...)

[Mistro11]

The water is a mesh as well? o_O wow! that must be a heavy model! :s
Why not do the water as a bump map or displacement map? (since you're rendering...)

It's not as bad as it looks. I try to stay at 50-100 pixels. In the more turbulent render, I splurged and went up to 150 pixels and it only took a few more seconds to compute. It only took seconds for these meshes to compute and the model is just fine. The water mesh is actually 1 component x2 with the second mesh component flipped so the waves line up and I don't see a seam in the render. My rig is a 4 year old Q6600 running XP. There is no performance hit at all, the export to Kerky was not long especially if the mesh is made with a 50 pixel bitmap. I just make sure I put those Xfrog trees in Kerkythea and not in Sketchup.

Why not bump or displacement map? I'm a firm believer in modeling for lighting and shadow effects as much as possible before faking with bump and displacement maps for the sake of authenticity. I did try the bump map way and was not satisfied with the results in Kerky because the shore line was just flat and not showing the waviness of the water. Not saying I don't use bump maps, I love playing with them. Just thought this plugin would take it to the next level as long as my rig can handle it. At 50 pixels, I'm surprised at how much detail we can still achieve. I'm getting a real kick out of making bump maps to make geometry.

River2monohidden.jpg

[panixia]

At 50 pixels, I'm surprised at how much detail we can still achieve. I'm getting a real kick out of making bump maps to make geometry.

I 100% agree with you.. this plug-in is really nice.. and the combination between those heavy meshes and vertex tools is amazing.. i used them combined for this quite heavy old sofa.. used heightmap for tuft and golden decorations, then tweaked and welded them using vertex tools.. pretty much faster and effective results than any bump/displacement/subdivision modeling approach i can think of..
i took some sceenshoot and i'm planning to do a tutorial in the next days about how to model this sofa using such approach..

your water looks pretty heavy-poly too..

[Mistro11]

Panixia, that couch looks awesome! I look forward to that tutorial. Really.
I just bought Vertex tools myself earlier this month. I have more practicing to do. Artisan is also a great companion to this plugin.

Yeah it's pretty heavy but not so bad. I just checked the file size of the water scenes. The one that's 50 pixels is 11mb and the 150 pixels is at 19mb. I'm gonna see what I can do about reducing poly count without losing quality. I consider a model to be really heavy when Sketchup begins to lag badly. The water mesh had a slight lag when I was moving the first copy. Other than that no lag at all.

[greenskp]

Hi guys!

This is a awesome plugin but i don't know how to convert into a image with grayscale.
For example, this image below.

Anybody help me?

[Dave R]

Image editor maybe?

1zx6zck gray scale.jpg

[thomthom]

If all you do is desaturating a colour image to grayscale then the plugin does this automatically while processing.

However, as I've been trying to stress before - converting an image to greyscale doesn't give you a height map. The light and dark areas doesn't properly represent high and low points of the geometry. Shadows, reflection and light direction will give incorrect result.

[Dave R]

André asked for a grey scale image so I gave him one. I didn't think it would be all that useful for creating the mesh since it doesn't suit the requirements of a height map.

[pilou]

Free Heightmap editor

[tacokid]

First, let me apologize because I have no idea where this is going. I have never posted on any forum, so it's all new to me. What I am trying to find out is how do you download the bitmap to mesh plugin and the tt_lib that goes with it? I have been clicking on links for a while, but I'm just going in circles. I hope this plugin does what shows on the video as it could solve my problem.

Thanks,
tacokid

[massimo]

Look at the very first post of the thread.

Cattura.JPG

Cattura_01.JPG

[thomthom]

And you can use this to aid the installation process: viewtopic.php?t=42315#p375454

[tacokid]

You're not going to believe this, but I was having the same trouble. You would think I'm just learning to use computer too !! I did find my problem. For some reason, when I disabled my pop up blocker and re-started my browser, the pop up blocker re-enabled. So I was chasing my own tail. Did get it downloaded and will try it soon.

Thanks a lot

[thomthom]

[frankleng]

thanks. very nice.

[Soyphrenn]

Just one question : no working with Sketchup MacOS ?

[Dave R]

Works just fine on my Mac (OSX 10.8.4)

I did this a few minutes ago.

BMP2mesh.png

[thomthom]

Yea, should work on OSX. Are you getting errors?
Did you install TT_Lib2 as well? (it's a required dependency.)

[jjduncs]

256x256 bmp taking 45 minutes to finish. Activity monitor shows Sketchup only using 5% while this is processing.

[tt_su]

256x256 bmp taking 45 minutes to finish. Activity monitor shows Sketchup only using 5% while this is processing.

How many cores do you have? Quad core hyper-threaded? SketchUp and Ruby 1.8 only makes use of a single core.

256x256 pixels would produce 131072 triangles - so you'd have quite a dense mesh. Ruby is quite slow by itself, but the bottleneck here is SketchUp's speed of adding geometry. The more geometry already in the group you add to the slower it gets.

[jjduncs]

Yeah quad core, not sure on the hyper-threading.

Ended up just scaling down to 100 x 100 in PS. Still took 20 minutes though. CPU usage only spikes higher for the last maybe 20 seconds after it finishes the generating mesh task.

Thanks though.
100x100 turned out fine anyway.

[khancyrus]

Hello,
I had a question. I have tried this plugin and it works brilliant, but I feel I could only make it work for rectangular or planes curved in one plane only. I just wanted to know if it is possible with more organic or bulbous or more bulging surfaces in all x,y,z planes. Please forgive me if I'm using wrong terms or doing it wrong.
Btw thanks for all the plugins thomthom!

CSK

[tt_su]

You mean take a surface mapped with a texture and generate new mesh - like a displacement map would?

[khancyrus]

Its sth like that if Im understanding what it is, for example I wish to create a mesh a bulging surface that would have holes in it, taken from Half tone bitmaps.
For example, the facades of BIG's Tam Art Cross, but in this case a bulbous one! Im wondering, is it possible in sketchup?

http://www.big.dk/#projects-tam

[cuttingedge]

Hi everyone, just installed bitmap to mesh. Can anyone show me where I can locate the tool?

[Dave R]

From the first post of the thread:

2013-11-21_06-27-41.png

[cuttingedge]

Thanks Dave, Im so lost in my jungle of plugins..