Suggestions for greenscape in a model?

EscapeArtist · 23 Jun 2011, 19:30

I have a cottage that I've built in SU and really want to push this towards a photoreal render. The structure comes out fine, I found some grass that works great, but the thing that I can't seem to get down are things like shrubs, trees, flowers and other ground cover items. Looks pretty barren otherwise. Any suggestions? Any threads that have some good how-to examples? Disregard the blockish ivy, still figuring out Thea's instancing tools.

Thanks!

Booman · 24 Jun 2011, 01:38

Are you planning to model the shrubbery yourself or are you looking for some pre-made models?
I have tried using the 3D trees/bushes from the google warehouse and then render them in Kerkythea, but they still came out kind of cartoony.
A quicker way is to find high quality pictures of the trees/bushes you want and then cut out the background with photoshop. There are plenty of assets like these online, but not always high quality. Then you can create components that always face the camera. They work well because these will cast shadows too.

Gaieus · 24 Jun 2011, 03:14

Jeff, here are some excellent grass and shrub models directly for Thea:
http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=46296#p46296

EscapeArtist · 24 Jun 2011, 16:11

Brian, thanks. I'll try that but getting the lighting to match may be a problem. I definitely don't want cartoony.

Csaba, thanks for pointing those out, I'd forgotten about them. Need to find some ground cover and flowers to fill in the blanks.

Booman · 24 Jun 2011, 19:25

keep us updated. I would love to hear what you end up doing with adding background and surrounding softscape

pmolson · 25 Jun 2011, 15:58

Hi escape artist.

photoshopping in your suroundings can work very well.

The image here is not a good example, because of the image resolution, but
you can see that photo realism could be achieved fairly easily.

I just googled "old cottage images" and grabbed a photo of a cottage with a similer
view as yours and cut your grass and background out.

With good resolution images this works well.

p

Booman · 25 Jun 2011, 19:12

Great idea... Photoshop can be used extremely well in this situation.
If he wants to do different angles, that is a whole other story.
I modeled a whole pirate ship in Sketchup and rendered it in Kerkythea, but needed many different angles of the ship.
So I used photoshop for the sky and water, but still had to render all the angles/lighting for each shot.
Pirate Ship1
Pirate Ship2