Adding sky and ground images? [SU8 free]
-
Stupid question here:
I want to present models as in a scene;
so can you insert an image of a sky and ground?
Like in this example, I want clouds and soil instead of blue in blue:
Tutorials mostly cover 'match photo' and 'photo textures'...
I'm sure there's some simple way of doing it, I just don't see it.
SketchUp 8 Free version.
-
Not even close to a stupid question!
This is a very good question and one that I am afraid to make the sky look just right won't be easy. Let me explain...if you want a sky texture mapped into a sphere correctly so that when you look around the sky doesn't stay fixed as it would if you used the 'Watermark Settings' in the style option menu then the sphere is UV's need to be properly unwrapped before applying sky texture. I say this because I tried projecting it initially and the result was that the texture looked stretched.
I am very interested to work on a possible plugin to have animated sky system with cloud layers and day slowly animating into night but like I said its probably going to be hard work. Again brilliant question and I will try to work on a possible solution in the future but in the mean time take a look at my other plugin called 'Rain' which allows you to have kind of a weather system inside SketchUp.
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=48846
Cheers!
-
Thanks. That rain looks pretty good.
I'm surprised SU doesn't have a simple feature for skyboxes,
seeing as it's popular for architectural purposes - presenting models.I must assume a sky like this:
... is not made within SU, but an external program then.
-
Fortunately Sketchup has a sharing community in which case you can search "Sky Dome" in the following site;
I bet you can find a lot of options there so that you are not left empty handed.
-
I'm not impressed by those sky-domes. Seems like a half solution.
Looking forward to a sky-dome plugin
Might end up just putting the pictures in the scene like this:
(I know the sun is behind and the light is in front. It's just a test )Thank you.
-
I'm curious. what would this plugin of yours do? How would it work? Would it create a sky dome and paint a material on it?
Maybe they could add the ability to add an image to the sky for the next pro version of SketchUp.
-
Hi Adorno, hi folks.
You can use a sky picture as a Watermark (read about Watermarks in the help) and then use a ground texture (grass or whatever) on a large face acting as the ground plane.
Just ideas.
-
@dave r said:
I'm curious. what would this plugin of yours do?
What I am basically planning is to have animated day to night system like you would see in a game for example were the hours are accelerated or that you can click and access a specific hour. Maybe if I have the time I will ad a probability of raining to it. Also if I can figure a way to know when you are looking at the sun it will be cool to add sun flairs but all this is just an idea at the moment.
@dave r said:
How would it work?
Not 100% on this but I am pretty sure I will use lots of scene tabs to transition between sky colors using the 'sky' option on the style menu. I don't want to use an image with clouds already because I want to be able to animate clouds. For the clouds I have already tested painting them in Photoshop and exporting them as PNG files and they look pretty good. Making animated clouds look good takes a little bit more than just moving them because the cloud transform in shape density as well which to achieve this I will need to approach it like I did the wind in the rain plugin.
At night you will want to see the moon & stars and also the lighting should be lower. To make the lighting go lower you can have a black watermark image and use transparency to modify it and if you want bright light you use white image...I kinda used this when the thunder hit on the rain plugin. For the moon and stars again I will have to use PNG textures.
@dave r said:
Would it create a sky dome and paint a material on it?
No this could be an option but not the one I am thinking of.
@jean lemire said:
You can use a sky picture as a Watermark (read about Watermarks in the help) and then use a ground texture (grass or whatever) on a large face acting as the ground plane.
This would be the correct approach if you only want still images of you model and not have people interact with the model in real-time or make animation.
Cheers
-
The watermark disappears when rendering an image (v-ray), obviously.
Looking forward to that plugin
I expectet SU to have a skybox feature similar to open world 3D video games.
Here I just made a ground texture, added a sky image within the frame, and rendered:
(I make models for PC game; so no scenes, and low poly) -
Well, SketchUp wasn't designed to do what you're doing with it. Maybe, as I said before, they'll incorporate this feature into the next pro version.
Advertisement