'Graphics'...
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I doubt SU will every be anything more than a modeller. Best bet is to settle for one of the third-party render plugins available.
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You should have a look at lightup, it does a lot of what you mention there (no real time editing, though.)
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The goal here isn't something so external, and I don't want to make a picture, or spend hours creating a video; LightUp scores slightly under the mark for quality, and it looks like it just bakes shading into the textures (Not real-time). What I'm talking about is a direct adittion to SU's renderer... it's always had a stronger focus on appearance than other programs, why not take it a step further?
Even if vastly increasing the quality isn't an option, the effeciency is still awful. At the very least, the technique used for shadows could be updated, to allow soft shadows and multiple light sources, and, well, run faster. And would changing how individual surfaces are shaded really be so hard?
I'm still asking too much, aren't I?
Oh well... -
I just strongly doubt it'll ever happen. While SU could have the potential of becoming more than just a modeller, I think Google will keep the "Sketch" in Sketchup. I have resigned with this and hope that they will focus developing SU as a platform for thirdparty plugins to enhance and adapt SU to each user's need.
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There was mention of the graphical capabilities in the survey (I forget which one)... they had options for reflections (Maybe real-time?) and 'improving the shadows', which most people think meant 'fixing the shadow bug'... but I hope there's more to it than that
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That's true. I wish they'd give some comments on the surveys. Or some statement on the direction they're going for...
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If they add anything like what I'm talking about, it'll only be in the pro version; for people like yourself, that's not a problem, but I can't really afford to spend that much on software. I'm very keen on it being real-time, mainly because I like SketchyPhysics, and it really annoys me that I can't make my games bigger, faster and better looking; with the current effeciency, shadows, and even lines need to be turned off to play at a reasonable framerate, on what is essentially an ultra-low poly model. I guess effeciency is what they'll be focusing on, but that'd make it more of a 7.5 release; they'll need good new features to back it up. I'm wondering whether organic modelling will play a role, and maybe a bit of object-based animation...?
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If anything i would have thought the sort of things your talking about would be more appropriate for the free version. game style graphics are only just reaching high enough quality for presentation, i think, and people who use SU for paid work will better appreciate the amount of control and power provided by external render engines.
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The original realtime features were meant for realtime assistance in visualization during presentation or during modeling. I remember the @Last marketing videos where they talked about this. Google really hasn't developed anything new in the graphics since they acquired SU, and it's embarrasing now how few polygons it takes to turn shadows into a non-realtime feature, at least in relation to where other modelers with shading or shadows are now at.
Personally, I would like to see the current rendering features made much more efficient. Surely using four 64-bit hyperthreaded cores ought to make shadows, textures and outlines much, much faster. REALTIME, even.
And in the spirit of just staying up with the current capabilities of other MODELERS, and the visualization abilities they have added, I would like to see a real-time or at least a non-realtime (but fast) ambient occlusion render. This combined with texture and shadow should make a very nice, easily visualized presentation or model. Or even without shadow and texture: It's amazing how much AO does for correctly perceiving the volume and shape, or relative depth of surfaces in the render.
If there is AO rendering with SU, then I can see a feature like an 'AO Texturizer'. I'm thinking of something where a highly detailed model (house with all moulding, mullions, etc. modeled) rendered in AO, and then textures of each side of the house are applied to a simplified model so that the medium detail is shown as a texure on the low-poly house. Or conversely, the poly-model isn't changed, but the textures are applied so that the model now appears to be rendered with AO in a realtime renderer that doesn't have AO at all. Having SU bake in the AO shading into a textured surface, or automatically making a non-textured surface a textured surface and baking in the AO shading would be pretty desirable.
It's a trick used in games all the time for both characters and mechanical devices:
- Model the large, medium, and fine detail.
- Render this with AO+texture in the modeler and get screen shots from all sides.
- Retexture the model using the AO+texture screenshots as the model textures.
- Remove all the fine (& sometimes medium) detail that can just be represented as texture only. (some fine details can be realized as normal or displacement maps in games - unlikely to ever be added to SU.)
- Now when rendered in the game, the object looks like it is being rendered with AO, but it's not.
The same trick can be used purely within SU to get better looking, faster-running realtime presentations, such as in walkthroughs/flythroughs of large developments or in the SketchyPhysics sims Wacov is doing. You couldn't tell the difference between realtime AO and AO textures unless objects move within the scene relative to the ground or each other, or they change shape, and even with motion, I think it's still over 90% as good as realtime AO.
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If Google really want to allow real-time, effective visualization, they should move down the road of game engines. You can now get effects pretty close to, or even surpassing renders... for AO, screen-space ambient occlusion may not be perfect, but it's a very nice effect:
Combine that with soft-edged shadows, and material-specific shaders (Fresnel reflections, specular highlights, bumpmapping), and you've got something that anyone can use to make great-looking presentations. And this is all most-definately possible in real-time!
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I'm a millimeter away from switching from SU to Modo. It isn't as easy to just pick up and use at first, but as I learn it, I'm starting to think that, inferencing engine aside, I can be ultimately faster in Modo (for what I actually do, not just extruding blocks) than I can even approach in SU. Modo 401 now imports SolidWorks. (Huge for my situation.) Modo can do a full-screen preview render using Global Illumination with environment in seconds, sometimes actually as fast or FASTER than SU can update the same scene with SU shadows and profile lines in the actual scenes I'm doing. Modo won't choke on mere thousands or tens of thousands of polygons. Modo 401 can be had for $895 at some resellers, compared to the $795 we paid for a network license of SU. Modo does instancing and 'replicating', which means it can get into the millions of polygons compared to thousands in SU. I'm not saying it is better than SU in every way for ArchViz, but for my needs, it IS far superior. On the other hand, a lot of people are doing ArchViz in Modo now. Of course, both apps use polygons and can use .obj, so using both together is a great option.
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