Camera Views w/ SU and Other Programs

Rudbeckia

Hi SU Folks!

Hope everyone had a good new year! I have a quick question about camera views. I want to

set up a scene in SU, and render a portion of that view (for example all of the walls) with Podium or KT and export it as a jpeg

Then I want to import the same SU model into VUE, add the plants, render the plants only, export at jpeg

Then put it all together in Photoshop. Does anyone do this? I watched a webinar where the guy did this with 3dsmax and photoshop

I realize the above is a lot of steps, but if someone could just help me out with how to match my camera views bt SU and other programs I would appreciate it. Thanks

Chris Fullmer

Matching cameras depends ont he rendering software. Most of them have some way to match the camera now. I'm pretty sure Podium matches is fairly easily by default, right? Vue used to be slightly trickier. I think it required a script that someone here on the forum wrote. Solo probably did a write up of how to use the script, or maybe the script author did. I don't recall the name of the script or the author. But VUE also recently released a new SketchUp importer. I'm not sure if you own that, or if it has camera matching capabilities built in. If you don't have it, I know there was a script out there that allowed you to match cameras inside of Vue, you just have to dig around here and find it.

Then one of the main tricks is that its a good idea to export the alpha map when you render. This is also done differently on each rendering engine. Thea has a clickbox that you must select before starting the render. I do not recall how Vue does it, but I know it can make an alpha map. So you would want to render the plants, and the alpha map and combine those in Photoshop. The alpha map will clip out everything from the render that is not an object. So if you only have plants turned on, then it will clip out all the background sky and groundplane.

It is not that tricky of a process, it just takes time to learn how to make each render engine export the parts you want. Do you know photoshop well enough to be able to combine all the different images?

Chris

Rudbeckia

Thanks Chris

Yes I know photoshop and podium....VUE is the one I dont know very well. I will search around on here and see if I can find the info for VUE you mention.

I do not have the VUE SU importer yet, so I will look into that. Thanks for the help!

Rudbeckia

I found the info if anyone is interested

http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/showthread.php?10974-Sketchup-to-Vue-camera