[TUTORIAL] Dead Easy Soft Shadows
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This won't be news to those who are experienced in such things but perhaps some of the newer users will find it useful.
Things are always sunny in SketchUp land and the sky is always clear. This results in hard edged shadows when you have them turned on. Here's a pretty easy way to soften those shadows. Admittedly you can't do it all in SketchUp but it isn't difficult nor does it take a long time.
To start with you need to make at least two image exports. I make three and show them here.
The first export is with textures turned on and Use Sun For Shading ticked. Shadows are not turned on for this image. If you're only making two exports, leave edges turned on in the Styles dialog.
The next export I make is in Hidden Line mode. Again, no shadows.
Finally, for the last export, turn on shadows and turn off Edges under the Styles dialog Edit tab.
Open your favorite image editor--I used Paint.NET (freeware for PC)--to make this example.
Open the images you've just exported. Go to the shadow image and use a blurring tool to soften it. I used Gaussian blur for this but there are several choices and you'll get different kinds of blurring with them. It's worth experimenting.
Add two new layers over the softened shadow layer. Set both layers to Multiply. Copy and paste the textured image and the lines image to those two layers. Crop if desired and save the new image. Done.
For this last image I ran the textured image through FotoSketcher first and I didn't soften the shadows quite so much.
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Thanks for the tut, nice & clear to follow.
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Great TUT Dave
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Thank you JGA and Mike.
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Softy
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Nice and easy!
There's a good way to automate the process if you want to make a lot of those images. And if you have photoshop & bridge. Make three scenes with style settings as described. Include these three in the animation. For every camera scene, export those three style scenes (in an animation without transitions).
In bridge, select the three images, go to Tools>photoshop>Open files into photoshop layers. Make an action for the blurring and blending of the layers and save. Now you just have to repeat this action on the next series of images.
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excuse me, Dave.
i can't see most of those images now.
are those images still host on flickr? -
You really can't see them?
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i can see them now, Dave.
thank you. they were only flickr logos when i open this page before.
how did you do that?
anyways thank you very much.
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