Shiny paint

[hellnbak]

Is there any way to make the paint on objects, mainly cars, look shiny? And the chrome? Any help would be much appreciated.

[solo]

That would require reflection, so nope not possible in SU, but if you are rendering then it's possible.

[Dave R]

Pete's right although on occasion I'll simulate a reflective surface by painting the surfaces different shades of color. It's not perfect but it can give the idea of reflective surfaces. Not so good for really shiny stuff so you would need to work with a rendering application like Pete said.

[museummaker]

@unknownuser said:

Pete's right although on occasion I'll simulate a reflective surface by painting the surfaces different shades of color

Sweet trick, love it. Almost like adding a specular map!

[Dave R]

Thank you. It can be a little tedious but I think the results are worth it in many cases.

To do it, I turn on Hidden Geometry so the individual faces can be painted.

[hellnbak]

thanks for all the responses. Can anyone recommend a good (and hopefully cheap) rendering program, that works with Sketchup?

[Dave R]

Kerkythea is free and it works quite well.

[d12dozr]

Here is a list of many render apps for Sketchup , most of them have free demos so you can see what works well for you. If you have some money to spend, I suggest Twilight Render ($99) as it works inside Sketchup and tech support at their forum is first-class.

[Anssi]

Another popular way to simulate a shiny material in SU is use a texture - I most often use the CorrugateShiny standard material but increase the texture size, and sometimes even rotate it.

Anssi

[hellnbak]

I've heard of Kerkythea, but also heard that it has a very high learning curve. Let's see if I understand this - I can import something from Sketchup into Kerkythea, modify it there, like making the paint shiny, and then export the modified version back into Skethchup, with the shiny paint, to be worked on there also? Or once it's been modified in Kerkythea, there's no going back to Sketchup? My ignorance knows no bounds.

[Chris Fullmer]

@hellnbak said:

My ignorance knows no bounds.

Hey!, I like that - sort of similar to my signature, but much more concise.

----end hijack-----

[d12dozr]

@hellnbak said:

...Or once it's been modified in Kerkythea, there's no going back to Sketchup?

Exactly. Kerkythea, or other rendering programs, allow you to make photo-realistic images or animations from your model. SU image or animation output is considered NPR, or non-photo-realistic, because SU does not allow a user to add more lights than the sun, and can't create reflections or other lighting effects.

[Gaieus]

If you want to have the shiny things (and all real time photorealistic effects) insideSU actively, have a look at LightUp .

Once you set up your materials and run the renderer ("Tour mode"), you are INSketchUp with all the effects and can walk around, export images/videos etc.