New to Rendering
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Hello again. I have some experience in rendering 3D scenes in Maya, Bryce and 3dS max but not with Sketchup. I notice this program is different when it comes to rendering a scene. I am working from a photograph of a church building. There is a house connected to the church that they want to turn into another smaller church (that's where the modifications to the attached building comes in).
In my final render, I want to show the modified building with proper lighting and mood to blend with the larger church in the background using the original photograph. It doesn't have to be super perfect but I don't want to present an blatant sketched looking building against the photograph, I want to get as close as I can. I thought of exporting the model into Maya with the photo as a back drop and taking it from there but before I go through that adventure, I just want to know if there is an easier or more "local to Sketchup" way of reaching my goal? I had bad experiences in the past with exporting models from one program to another, but I'm willing to learn. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
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If you are familiar with and have access to 3ds, that would be my suggestion. It can now import .skp files and it is a very good workflow. Otherwise, there are a number of threads on the forum about rendering plugins for SketchUp, some of the most mentioned being: Kerkythea, Twilight, Thea, and VRay, to mention only a few.
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You could use SU's PhotoMatch feature to actually model the church itself then project the photo onto the model. Add your renovation model to it afterwards.
Just a thought...
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Just use the photo as originally intended and model the addition.
Then download and install Kerkythea.
You can export your model from Sketchup to Kerkythea very easily.
Then you can add some adjustments in Kerkythea like normal/bump maps and tweak the lighting/shadows.
You can even adjust the camera angle on the addition to match the existing photo.
Then do the same with the sun lighting.
You can even add the photo as a background right in Kerkythea.
Make sure to do a bunch of low quality renderings while you tweak the lighting/camera angles. -
If you use PhotoMatch to "grab" the original model of the church and then to use that model to build the addition, you have very good chances to make some renders that blend the new building nicely into the photo. One important thing, when starting with PhotoMatch, SU adds a scene to the model. Never delete or modify that scene (by modification, I mean the camera first of all). You can even export the actual model from this "master model" and work on it in a separate file then reload it later to make sure nothing is wrong.
If you have several photos of the building, you can match those with the already built model easily to add more shots later.
The most important from then on (whatever rendering engine you use) is to be able to export (or render inside SU) a camera angle where it is exactly the same view as in your SU model and its background.
For this, to me, obviously something working inside SU would be the ideal but of course, all depends whether you are now just a temporary "re-visitor" of SU or you will work more in the future so that it is worth investing some money into it.
Kerkythea is great (and of course, nothing can beat its price) but to e it seems that the camera FOV and angle has never exported perfectly the same for me.
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Thanks for your replies!
@unknownuser said:
by Rich O'Brien on Wed Mar 23, 2011 3:23 pm
You could use SU's PhotoMatch feature to actually model the church itself then project the photo onto the model. Add your renovation model to it afterwards.Yes, that's the method I used to begin with.
@unknownuser said:
by ledisnomad on Wed Mar 23, 2011 2:17 pm
If you are familiar with and have access to 3ds, that would be my suggestion. It can now import .skp files and it is a very good workflow. Otherwise, there are a number of threads on the forum about rendering plugins for SketchUp, some of the most mentioned being: Kerkythea, Twilight, Thea, and VRay, to mention only a few.Would the faces imort into 3ds without the faces having triangles all over them? Nice and clean as it was created in Sketchup?
@Gaieus: Thanks for the details. I finally went through enough tutorials to build enough confidence in my using the app. that I can say it is now part of my creative arsenal and I will be using it for many projects to come.
@Booman: Thanks for the info....I have a lot of reading to do.
I successfully exported the building into Blender via dae. file. All seems to be intact. I know there's a bit of a learning curve in Blender but I seen some impressive results from that program in galleries. I love working with Sketchup and I am officially making it my base starting point for modeling non organic subjects and then use other programs for refining and post production for realistic renderings.
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Blender is a great modeling tool too. The learning curve is pretty high because it can do so much... Rendering, UV unwrap, game engine...
I have been playing with Blender for the last month and have learned alot about the provided tools.
Your best bet is to learn the keyboard short cuts. Just like in Sketchup, there are keyboard shortcuts for every tool.
Much quicker than "space" menu, menu, menu
Let me know if you have any Blender questions...
I build my low polygon models in Sketchup, export as OBJ and import into Blender. Then I have learned to UV Unwrap and optimize for game design -
Mistroll, I don't think it come in "clean" like in SketchUp, just minimal triangulation. The renderer at my office uses this workflow: we all model in SketchUp, she renders in 3ds. However, I don't see triangulation in 3ds as a problem if you're just going to render it, unless you want to see some sort of wireframe in your renderings.
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