@escapeartist said: I put the diamond inside a cylinder, and then shrank the cylinder until the diamond's edge protruded a little outside of it. I made a 32-sided polygon, 20' radius and Push/Pulled it up a foot. Deleted 30 sides. Turned the axes so one face was in the rg plane, laid guides and drew lines. Ditto the other face. Last, grouped and used a moving/copying rotate to finish the girdle. A neat, Sunday-afternoon modeling hack. I'll be using this to decorate my UI in the other kind of ruby if I can ever finish fighting through the bugs. [image: sketchup_rubies_icon.gif] Now I've got a ruby, 40' around reduced to an 88x64 px icon.

Every nice PP app has a color management option. 8bit per channel = 3x8=24bits. Just be sure that your photo has a color profile embedded, then very nice OSs can project colors correct on your monitor. MacOSX and windowsVista can do it. WinXP or some LINUXs... no, sorry. Maybe this explains why photos opened in photoshop, look deferent than any XP photo viewer. sRGB is fine for most cases. Just ask your app to do this. Look in prefs maybe there is something there, (color management), I can help for photoshop and gimp if you like. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management

Thanks bud!

Nice renderings, Philippe. In my opinion, the building on the right in the second image detracts from the rendering (the color and angle aren't complimentary), and as it isn't in the other images, I'd lose it.

Here is my submittal. A story is involved with this one. This home is designed is for a homeless Vietnam Veteran, Ray Black, forgotten by a nation and dismissed by our healthcare system. Ray needs to live in a place that the sound can drown out the voices of guilt raining in his head. Mr. Black's home is made a scrap metal from a recently demolished steel mill. Ray welded the shell himself, and insulated the interior with recycled cardboard. The house is suspended from a local underpass in Chattanooga, TN. Video http://vimeo.com/6575968 [image: 3852341655_8c5907cf2a_b.jpg] [image: 3852329491_cd16581f3d_b.jpg] [image: 3853123964_268250e290_b.jpg] [image: 3853133202_ed3ca80c50_b.jpg]

Thanks for the nice comments. I placed the camera too close for such a tall building; how's this? Unfortunately, some of the detail is lost. Dylan, your correct the foreground leaves much to be desired (the whole site, really). It should be gravel, but the texture I used was tiling too much. Eventually, I plan on modeling more Williamsburg models and I will put the courthouse in a more appropriate context. The trees, rendering are Vue Infinite. [image: 1wqZ_CourthouseLeft3.jpg]

yeah I would like to see I'm curious

Marcus, I believe the brick your seeing on the right is in line with the wall the stairs are on, whereas the other (smaller) brick is at the far end of the room on the other side of that wall. Beautiful image, Oliver. 'Specially like the slanted shadows juxtaposed with the stair railing.

I just watched the video - thanks for updating the link - I loved the concept and your renders - as I'm deathly afraid of heights I doubt I'd get much sleep there but I bet the views would be great!

hi mike, artlantis (i use 2.1.0.4) can open skp files directly. you don't have to have an exporter for artlantis to use with SU free.

Thanks, Tina...good to hear: with my proclivities (and I'm starting to suspect my monitor as well) I was thinking it might be a bit hazy and dull.

Thanks Guys, Very useful comments, I'll work on the ivy and the stone. Dylan, these were done with VRay, the plants added in photoshop then soft focus added with paint.net. Adam thanks again for the plants. Ed

Hi everyone, Had some free time today to play around, so I thought I could make some more renders, perhaps this time try some indoor rendering. It's supposed to be some underground parking, nothing fancy, just walls and columns. So I think these renders look a bit better (or at least more realistic) than the old ones: [image: ePvR_ferrariredgarage1.jpg] [image: dmQU_ferrarigraygarage1.jpg] [image: eHew_ferrariblackgarage1.jpg]

Great work Jason ,and a pretty slick website too

As you can see here I wanted the ground to be reflective but when I have shadows turned on I get a big shadow on the ground below even when i uncheck the box to say I dont want shadows on the ground or faces, however when I light the scene using the sun there are no ground shadows? Wonder if its a glitch or im going around it the wrong way. Anyway another model another render. [image: x0g3_20090821223237_6m4s.jpg]

In architect point of view, design of this bldg. is quite simple. But when see ur presentation, it become very nice condo. So amazing to me.

I wonder how the result come if draw bldg.in snow surrounding with native SU (non-rendering)? If u have some, pls show us. for this pic, I have no doubt nice design and excellent rendering.

U need to spend a bit time to put more details in ur work. Not only building but environment also. For example, ur tree look too massive, put people and cars, the glass look matt and non-transparent etc. I suggest u to study more about material and color scheme too. I strongly recommend u should try human-eye level view first, Much easier to do than bird eye view. U have nice start,keep go on.

no...i wish. well i used match colour (background image as source) at first to get a general hue of the background photo, with v low opacity. then was just a case of curves, levels, hue/saturation, contrast, colour balance. selective colour, gradients, sharpness, high pass filter, offset grunge overlay for better texturing. playing with different belnding modes helps a lot I always make sure to use adjustment layers as clipping masks too so you can fade them in/out. once the shadows and general colour was right I flattened the image and worked on the photo and render together to add more warmth, sharpness, god rays (v pale), depth, saturation and finally a vignette at the end. the actual render was very off in colour (very yellow and saturated) and stuck out like a sore thumb cos its texture baked from in-game images.

@durant hapke said: That image needs a sound track. It's got one. Cup your ears. [image: a1CM_keuken2.jpg]