July 15, 2012, 01:38:04 am
The next problem ist (always since I use Lumion), that sooo often my materials appear all white after exporting them from SkUP. So my whole model is white and I have to find the "mistake" or split the model in dofferent parts and fit them together in Lumion again 
Massive work for nothing. Is there a better solution ?
Lumion looks at all the surfaces defined with the same material allocated and combines all surfaces with same material into one renderable surface, this is part of its optimisation that allows for realtime etc.
Usually if you don't assign any specific material in SkUp, it has the 'default' material, so all faces when exported will be the same overall surface, and the same single material (seen as white). So when you try to select and apply materials in Lumion everything will be the same single material. This is as it should be.
Almost always work within the DCC to apply unique materials to all the surfaces that are ever likely to require some specific material.
So if a surface has a material belonging to another surface, then it does not know that that should be separate unless you tell it that it should be separate. The way to do that is apply different materials in SketchUp, only needs to be a different name (ie can have all the other settings that same).
So for a wall you could have a single plane, assign 'wallFront' to one side and 'wallBack' to the other face, and exporting as single sided you will find both materials on each side are different in Lumion, can be selected as separate surfaces to change or amend material settings, and each will interact with lighting for the normals facing out from that surface.
You should never have to split models and fit together in Lumion to resolve what is a process of applying materials to required faces. Only time needed to split is when the scene had massive models with heaps of poly and the importer process works better to get the model in if split to smaller chunks.
HTH.
