Introducing RoomBox (1.0.0-beta1)

RoomBox General
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roombox

Welcome to the first Beta round of our new extension, RoomBox!

What is RoomBox?

RoomBox allows you to quickly and easily populate a building model with lightweight fake interiors.
A room is made of just a handful of faces, but from a distance it looks like a fully furnished, textured, and lit interior.
This is great for breathing life into exterior shots of buildings.

RoomBox comes with a marketplace where you can download free and paid rooms. There are packs made by us and by third parties like Evermotion, wParallax, and ShadersBox.
These rooms come with day and night lighting, low and high-resolution.

The extension itself is free with a few free rooms, and you can purchase more rooms and unlock the ability to import your own maps (or maps downloaded elsewhere).

It supports V-Ray, Enscape, and Thea. Other rendering engines can also render the rooms, but they will not be self-illuminated by default.

Here is the WIP documentation: https://lindale-dev.gitbook.io/roombox-help/

Why do we need you?

This is a first Beta version. We need your help to test it and find bugs before the public release.

More rooms and packs will be added to the marketplace in the coming weeks from third-parties.
You can already purchase the “Starter Pack” created by us. The price of 49€ has been lowered to 1€ during the Beta. Please purchase it if you can/want, to help us make sure the purchasing pipeline works correctly. As a thank you for your involvement in the Beta program, you will keep this pack even after we increase the price for the public release.
Note that the Starter Pack advertises 15 rooms, but currently contains only 11. The missing ones will be added soon.

You can report bugs and issues, as well as ask any question or ideas, here in this private forum.

A word of warning

Please do not use the beta versions for professional and/or serious modelling projects.

RoomBox might go through major internal changes before the public release, and we cannot guarantee compatibility from one beta version to another.

How to download it?

You can download the installer here: https://files.getskatter.com/roombox-1.0.0-beta1.rbz.
To install it, go to SketchUp > Window > Extension Manager > Install Extension, then select the .rbz file you just downloaded.

Please do not share this link outside of the Beta group. It is strictly confidential. Anyone sharing the link or installer outside of the Beta group will be banned from it.

We hope you will enjoy this one! Thanks in advance for your help :wink:

@roombox_beta

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NO WAY!!!

What an amazing idea, I look forward to testing this!

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Wow! Thanks for adding me. :heart_eyes:

The download link is not working for me. Nothing download after clicking on the button.

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Can you try copy/pasting the link to a new tab?

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Pasting the link to a new tab worked. :smiley:

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Hi Thomas! This is so awesome! I’m glad you worked on this! I was actually looking for something like this for Sketchup. This will be a huge game changer!

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Hi there Thomas!
What a great idea for a plugin, congratulations. Love at first sight!
I’ll give it a try during this week.
Greetings!

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I found time to play with Roombox today. :grinning: Noticed a few things I don’t know it’s a bug or something I’m doing wrong.

  • The room placement is not expected when I place it on the Z-Y plane.

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  • it seems like there is no difference between 1k and 4k textures.

Suggestions

  • In a library, It would be great if it showed the room’s dimensions by hovering the mouse over thumbnails. HxWxD so I can choose the correct room more quickly.

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  • Both the Room editor and library is taking up too much space in the viewport. It would be great if you merge both windows into one. like this.

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This is great stuff! First I thought it was a parallax texture library, but once I understood what it was, I found it a great asset idea!

I’m mostly using Twinmotion for my final production these days though. I will have to see how I can deal with it as it doesn’t support proxies at this point.

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Thanks for the report, we missed this bug!

Do you mean in the SketchUp viewport, or when rendering?

This is a good idea, we will discuss it.

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It is, we use the same maps. But since the parallax shader cannot be used in the rendering engines available in SketchUp, we apply the maps to some simple geometry.

WParallax, ShadersBox, and Evermotion originally created their maps for parallax interiors.

You will likely have to convert the materials in Twinmotion to make them emissive. I am curious to see your results and workflow!

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In the first prototype of RoomBox, we actually had a single window that looked similar to your mockup.

During development, we decided to split the UI into two windows to simplify the RoomBox workflow and to better match the way other extensions split their “library UI” from their “edition UI”.

We considered different ideas (tabs like you suggested / library and editor side by side in the same window / collapsible editor) but we ended up with two separate windows. The downside is that it takes more space in the viewport but it just feels clearer than the other alternatives that we explored.

(Please note that you can reduce the size of the windows to your liking! The UI should scale down reasonnably well.)

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Well. Twinmotion supports Parallax, I don’t know if these are some different sort of parallax though. If they are standard parallax, then I don’t see why this can’t be used in Twinmotion out of the box. If you have the simple geometry and the parallax textures are downloaded into an accessible folder, then it’s just a matter of using them in Twinmotion.

I also think there is a way to replace a placeholder geometry for a ready made Twinmotion object. I have to explore that option though, as I never really tried.

Anyway, Thea is still my prefered engine and it allows for the creation of way better images, the problem is that I don’t have so much time for the creation of those images these days and I have to stick to low quality rendering and ready made Twinmotion assets for speedy results.

It would be great if we could find a way of streamlining a possible Twinmotion workflow with your plugin.

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We would love to, even for Skatter and Transmutr. But there is no way for us to feed information to Twinmotion. It is a closed ecosystem, and they import only the information they want.

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Maybe at this point it’s a question of investigating the best possible workflow and explaining that to users.

Transmutr - Twinmotion has a user Library and a direct link to Sketchup but it also works with other formats. The issue with Sketchup direct links is that Sketchup materials allow only for the diffuse texture. Have you tried something like having transmutr creating FBX exports or GLTF? I know it makes no sense to import FBX and export FBX, but that is a format that can carry extra material info that Sketchup doesn’t, so importing FBX files into Twinmotion would make sense as ready to use assets.

Skatter - What Skatter does is either to place proxies or tell the engine where to place proxies. If we could find ways of manually replacing objects we could select and use Twinmotion objects for those proxies.

Roombox - The same goes for Roombox. If we have the models being easily imported to Twinmotion and already sitting in our libraries, we could use them to replace the placeholders.

I’m not sure about replacing objects in Twinmotion but if it works…

I could take a look and we could discuss the workflow further.

EDIT: I was sure it was possible. Here is an image of the process. It wouldn’t be automatic, but it would be easy. We would just need the Roomboxes or Skatter objects to be nicely named and have Transmutr objects in our library, matching those objects. Then it would be a matter of some manual work, but it would be way easier than using Twinmotion to manually place a Roombox or paint trees.

I have asked for a proxy system feature for Sketchup to Twinmotion development in the past. I will insist with them.

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Hi @TutorialsUp, that bug should now be fixed in the latest beta.

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What would SketchUp be without your genius ideas!!?? Happy to play with this!

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Wow, amazing idea!
Thanks @Thomas for add me :grin:

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