Hello from an archaeologist
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This may be a treasure trove of information for me. I have been doing SketchUp modeling for over a year now. I have been modeling Native American earthworks in my spare time ( http://earthworkreconstruction.blogspot.com/ ), which has not been much since I'm in grad school. I am out on summer vacation and am trying to catch up. If anyone has any ruby suggestions I am all ears, or eyes as the case may be. I do mostly organic shapes which is not that easy in SketchUp. I am also looking to get better at textures, so I am also looking for suggestions in that category as well.
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Hi BamaArch, another archaeologist (by original trade) here although I specialize in provincial Roman archaeology (and we also have one World Heritage site of this era in town).
Anyway, we also have similar earth structures both from the Neolithic Era and early Iron age around (I guess you can even see the structures in this map). This latter one is the second largest in Europe actually and was used by the Celts up to the Roman conquest (there is a Medieval monastery in the middle now).
For such, organic "sculpting" I could suggest two plugins (both cost a bit of money but not much). One is Vertex tools which is perfect for terrain shaping and the other is Artisan that is a more generic but extremely powerful organic tool.
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@gaieus said:
For such, organic "sculpting" I could suggest two plugins (both cost a bit of money but not much). One is Vertex tools which is perfect for terrain shaping and the other is Artisan that is a more generic but extremely powerful organic tool.
For such "organic" modeelling and complex textures, I also suggest checking out Blender.
It's free, open-source software, and may better suit what you want to do - though be warned, it is a mightily complex bit of kit, so not half as easy to learn/use as Sketchup!
It will also happily import Collada or OBJ exports from Sketchup - so you can have the best of both worlds; using SU for ease of modelling, and Blender for the "fairy dust" to make things look prettier.
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