etroxel

Use DAE. You don't get layers, but objects are grouped together in SU so they can be edited. I find this the most reliable for getting geometry across. I don't know what's happened in v8.6—it's a mixed bag. You get geometry, but no textures. And sometimes you have to reverse faces. But at least it's better than before: DAE in v8.5 never worked. It worked best in v7... objects with textures exported properly. If you have that version, save your fZ file down, open it there and export to DAE.

You can also open the Views palette in the project you want to copy them from, put a checkmark next to each View entry using the Selection column to choose the cameras you want, copy to the clipboard, and paste them into your other project.

It was missing in my 8.6 WIP as well, so I tried to copy it from 8.5.7 plugins folder. That didn't work. I also checked the Extensions Manager to see if it wasn't turned on but it's not listed there.

Interesting additional info: the model READS as having different materials in Lumion. It just doesn't graphically show them where they've been previously assigned in FormZ.

I ended up using DAE over the weekend. The good news: geometry now exports! Unfortunately the model doesn't come into other apps with textures. The textures export from fZ, but the model comes into SketchUp and Lumion as all white. Having no textures is obviously an issue. Also, I've noticed that fZ is reordering the ID's of the faces upon additional exports making working in Lumion impossible. I would like to re-eport updated models and not have to redo all my texturing progress in Lumion. With the current face-reordering upon export, all work is lost.

I noticed with the latest build of the WIP that FBX isn't in there as an export option. I went back to 8.5.7 to try to get a model into Lumion and it had tons of missing faces and bad shading. I'm not sure what the culprit was. It seemed to work fine in an earlier build doing the same thing.

I did one for Maxwell Render 6 years ago (!) in Bonzai3d, the lighter version of FormZ at the time, but it's similar to how it's still done. The IBL / HDR portion starts at around 29:30. https://getmethod.com/blog/2011/9/27/maxwell-render-for-bonzai3d-exterior-lighting-rendering.html Hope that helps...

Thanks for providing the steps. It works for me with a user-defined reference plane. See attached screenshots.

Can you explain how to do this?

Sorry AC1000 I didn't know about Layout not working in v7. I've only done it from the modeling window myself. Good to know.

it's been broken since v8. If you still have v7, that works.

Hi Dubi, You can see the entire curriculum for my Fundamentals course here to get an idea of what I consider a baseline: https://getmethod.teachable.com/p/formz-fundamentals

Most realtime and VR applications require GTX cards, and like Smarttec said, apps like Solidworks and Revit want Quadro cards. It makes things difficult for those of us who ideally need both in the same machine.

Later edit: I forgot to mention to scale your model by 2.54 upon export, or within Lumion if you use my FBX recipe.

I've been thrilled with the performance of fZ on a 2016 MacBook Pro 15" loaded laptop and a 5k display. Would I like a new iMac Pro? Yes, but it's not in the budget this year. I'd love to do some of my work 2-300% faster on an operating system I love.