Soft, photorealistic shadows in SketchUp

Tim Danaher

Okay, it's a bit of a kludge...

I've been messing around with texture and lightmap baking in my favourite renderer, Cheetah3D...

Then I thought, what if I re-imported the texture maps back into SketchUp? And this is the result...

Picture 43.jpg

Here's a video: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Mp3eHtGLw

The workflow in Cheetah is, choose your mesh, 'bake' its texture...you get a UV-unwrapped, rendered texture map of your surface with all shadows, caustics, etc on there... you then simply re-apply the unwrapped, baked texture in your material's Colour channel. Because it's UV mapped, it wraps itself perfectly back around the geometry.

Of course, It only works for flat surfaces when you re-import these maps into SU...but this got me thinking... What if SU could bake & wrap its own shadows & textures? The shadows would then simply exist as part of the surface's material definition. The speed increase you get in rendering animations is phenomenal: that 46-sec video on YouTube rendered in around eight minutes -- about 5-6 times faster than if you rendered it with OpenGL shadows.

And we'd get rid of the flickering shadow problem...

(I realise this won't work if the sun has to move in your animation)

bellwells

I have often wondered why a shadow couldn't be expressed as a material. I think you're on to something here, Tim. I'm sure the SU gurus have pondered this, yes?