Are you ready for SketchUp 7 news?
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OK, so, I'm sorry I'm late to the SU7 News Party. I too attended the AIA but, because I've been swamped, haven't had a chance to post, until now.
I heard from a Googler (he's probably giggling now), who said more or less, "... SU releases will not be any farther apart as Photoshop; the time-lapse between releases should be more or less the same...". I couldn't bear the uncertainty anymore so did the homework: CS2 (Photoshop 9) was released April '05; CS3 was released exactly two years later (April 16, 2007); SU 6's beta-cycle started in July 6, 2006 and was eventually released January '07... therefore, the countdown to beta 7 should be hopefully less than a couple of months away(!?)
Cheers,
- Diego -
Naively and eternally optimistic
- Diego -
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Cool, then My guess for Sketchup 7 is July.
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If it is July, there may still be months taken by beta testing - especially if there are some new featurs added (like styles or photomatch to version 6).
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Ya Gai..,
but then they will loose the match against Photoshop
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Ahh Geee,
Been re-reading Lewis's enlightening conversations with the Gooogle VIPs...'Curvey Stuff?'....I think Lewis pretty well summed that up.
'Sketchy Styles?'...well it would have been a real hit about 3 years ago when the 'Watercolour Phase' was in full swing. The greatest exponent ot this style, Mr Marshall, was last heard of talking vaguely of Mondo before he vanished for good].
I think it's fair to say that photorealism is the prefered export option of most 'Pros' these days...and native SU probably works well as the non-PR, this-is-only-a-concept-and-is-easily-changed export. Sketchy Styles/Edges was dead in the water when it was introduced and its pretty depressing that the Google people even need to ask about it's popularity.
Maybe they need to spend even more time checking out this forum.
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I don't think SU needs a built-in renderer. I mean, we already have Indigo and Kerkythea and Podium and Yafray. And we can export to programs that have built-in rendering features already. Actually, i don't know why i'm posting this, because we probably won't get one.
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Human,
Yafray? Is there a Yafray exporter around?
If you know one I would love to see a link. -
@kwistenbiebel said:
Human,
Yafray? Is there a Yafray exporter around?
If you know one I would love to see a link.Yeah, it's called "Blender." And as a plus, with it you can high-poly-model "curvy stuff" until your eyeballs drop out.
More interesting than Yafray is the fact that Blender has a node-based "compositor" (multi-channel renderer with a graphic interface) which is quite an unusual beast. Here's a screenshot from the Blender site:
Among other things, you can mix and match photoreal and non-photoreal elements live. It's just bizarre.
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@lewiswadsworth said:
Yeah, it's called "Blender."
So Blender is an export thingie for SU to render with Yafray.
Hell, what a complex one. -
@stu said:
Ahh Geee,
Been re-reading Lewis's enlightening conversations with the Gooogle VIPs...'Curvey Stuff?'....I think Lewis pretty well summed that up.
'Sketchy Styles?'...well it would have been a real hit about 3 years ago when the 'Watercolour Phase' was in full swing. The greatest exponent ot this style, Mr Marshall, was last heard of talking vaguely of Mondo before he vanished for good].
I think it's fair to say that photorealism is the prefered export option of most 'Pros' these days...and native SU probably works well as the non-PR, this-is-only-a-concept-and-is-easily-changed export. Sketchy Styles/Edges was dead in the water when it was introduced and its pretty depressing that the Google people even need to ask about it's popularity.
Maybe they need to spend even more time checking out this forum.I still get a great many NPR rendering requests, although I rarely use Styles as part of the process. I did just upgrade my Piranesi license to make my life easier in that direction.
Stu is correct about PR being the preferred option of the "Pros", at least at SCF..you won't be seeing any of my NPR work here, as a consequence. I don't see the interest.
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@lewiswadsworth said:
tu is correct about PR being the preferred option of the "Pros", at least at SCF..you won't be seeing any of my NPR work here, as a consequence. I don't see the interest.
That's niot true, Lewis, you know. The fact that there are many people playing around with PR (and there are some impressive results to be honest) doesn't mean that other styles should vanish. Just look at Tom's or Tina's posts - when there is something new, there are many positive responses (maybe because there is a shortage of NPR renders?).
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@stu said:
Im basing these ideas on what I see here, in this forum....and I dont think it's too presumptive to think that what gets posted and discussed here is at the forefront of SU use
Yet, outside of this particular render-package-besotted forum, that doesn't entirely reflect trends in my field. One of the US architecture firms getting the most positive publicity in academia now, LTL, does not use PR rendering.
http://www.ltlwork.net/pages/portfolio.html
I strongly suspect they are using SketchUp, at least for recent work. (I'm often tempted to ask them for a job, since they seem to be hiring. I could be Lewis working at Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis!)
LTL came up in my conversation with John Bacus, incidentally...he had asked me if I knew of any cutting-edge firms that were using SU, since we all know of the chauvinistic ones that scorn it.
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I've studied the drawings of LTL and I came to the conclusion that they don't use sketchup. Even their recent stuff doesn't sniff of any styles. If anything, they may trace over a SU model, but from what I've seen (before they made their drawings the size of postage stamps on the website), my guess is a pencil perspective scanned in with tone added in Photoshop. My 2 cents!
PS I was laughed at in a London school of architecture for using SU. As far as I am aware, I believe it beats the pants off things like Rhino with some of the scripts I've seen.
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Gaieus, there are certainly some people doing great NPR works, me ol' mate Tom for one and of course the unbelievable stuff done by Ernest Burden 111.
But these days there isn't the interest in NPR that was generated by Dennis and Grant Marshall and it would seem that most of the energy devoted to outputting something distinct from native SU is in the PR area. And this is made so much easier today with SU exporters to apps like Kerkythea, Indigo etc and of course Podium.
Im basing these ideas on what I see here, in this forum....and I dont think it's too presumptive to think that what gets posted and discussed here is at the forefront of SU use -
@swedishnitro said:
PS I was laughed at in a London school of architecture for using SU. As far as I am aware, I believe it beats the pants off things like Rhino with some of the scripts I've seen.
Funny, almost everyone in CG laughs at Sketchup.
But it is a hypocrit thing as a lot of those Pros DO use Sketchup very often in one or another phase of their work. (an SU model gets imported in their dinosaur apps for composition, refined modeling, texturing and finally rendering)
They just don't say it, being afraid of being laughed at.
It's a snobbish world. -
It is too easy to imagine that the market that we are exposed to in our everyday work is the norm. Just because one's personal experience would tend to indicate that PR is the only viable market direction and that NPR is dying out, may not really reflect what is happening in the market at large.
In fact I can report that the interest in Piranesi at the AIA convention has significantly increased over previous years. If it were not true that there is a marked market interest in NPR then all the various applications out there that are attempting to add NPR rendering to their tool kit are mistaken. I hardly think that they are.
We had a representative of a giant PR rendering firm come to the Piranesi booth and he talked of his expectation that the interest in PR will dry up and there will be an increased interest in NPR. Not only is PR very expensive to generate, for conceptual work, of which there is a preponderance, NPR is much more compelling and involving for the client. He personally wished he could tackle NPR but indicated he was intimidated.
I wouldn't write off NPR just because your personal interest and experience is in the direction of PR. Different strokes......
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As I am not "on THE (architectural) market", I cannot contribute in that way but what I can tell is that when we made that Gothic Pécs project (which was/is actually quite a success at the exhibition) in Max, there arose a kind of "demand" for a book(let) edition of it and the final decision was something NPR (i.e. some sketchy edges style however not really wtercolour technique). So although they could have gone in the PR direction as well, they wanted to stick to a different appearance (maybe because I could produce some images that were - in their atmosphere at least - a bit similar to those medieval drawings and later cuts).
So I would not "bury" NPR either. The fact that lately there have been a couple of (more or less easily) usable renderer apps (and some of them are free or at least affordable) will not turn the "market" totally into this direction. It's the top of a wave now as many more people can discover them (like 3D modeling in general with the free SU and similar apps).
Yes, I like PR renderings, especially when they are really good and I'm amazed what can be achieved but I like NPR as well and enjoy the artistic implementations of it. It's like when I enjoy a photo exhibition as well as a painting gallery.
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@swedishnitro said:
I've studied the drawings of LTL and I came to the conclusion that they don't use sketchup. Even their recent stuff doesn't sniff of any styles. If anything, they may trace over a SU model, but from what I've seen (before they made their drawings the size of postage stamps on the website), my guess is a pencil perspective scanned in with tone added in Photoshop. My 2 cents!
PS I was laughed at in a London school of architecture for using SU. As far as I am aware, I believe it beats the pants off things like Rhino with some of the scripts I've seen.
That's possible, of course. Form-Z, handled correctly, could produce LTL's renderings.
I also teach graduate architecture courses in Rhino...don't fool yourself about SU being more capable, no matter how many scripts you employ. Anything can be modeled in Rhino, no matter how complex. And it can be modeled with a fabrication-ready level of precision utterly beyond SketchUp...1/256th of an inch is no problem. I took my Rhino training from a jewelry designer!
But for standard architectural assemblies, however, it can be a little tedious...too many steps are required in Rhino to do simple planar operations. And there are several hundred very particular surface-generating commands...most architects and architecture students (in my rather large experience here) don't understand (or willfully won't bother understanding) the subtle differences and how they impact fabrication.
I mix and match the two apps in my projects. SketchUp is great for quick planar, multi-component assemblies (component/blocks organization is not a strong point for Rhino), and if I need something precisely curved I do it in Rhino...which reads and writes SU files, so I can mash together the results for visualization in one or the other of the two packages.
(And Susan and Brian at the AIA convention talked me into upgrading my Piranesi license, so you can guess at the idiom I use to visualize them.)
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Thankfully, I haven't had much cause to go for Non Euclidian forms yet, but when I do, I'll probably go and learn Rhino properly
Is it easy to learn? The training I got went as far as 'here is how you load a script', without any references to the basics.
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@swedishnitro said:
Thankfully, I haven't had much cause to go for Non Euclidian forms yet, but when I do, I'll probably go and learn Rhino properly
Is it easy to learn? The training I got went as far as 'here is how you load a script', without any references to the basics.
Rhino? No, it's not easy to learn, for most people, and the interface has some really challenging issues. It's not SU. Teaching a beginning 3D design class centered on Rhino is like pulling (your own) teeth...over the course of a semester. Generally about a quarter of the students seem to understand the subtleties to the point where I can see them using the software for design and drafting.
This is part of the website I made for the last semester's class. If you scroll to the bottom of the page there are links to the major tutorial sites.
http://lewiswadsworth.net/rhino/resources.html
The Rhino TV site is fairly good:
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