20 Reasons for SketchUp artists to consider Blender

chippwalters

Personnal BirthDay's Card designed & handcrafted by Syd M itself that is so chic!

This page is a pleasure for the eyes!

Yes, Syd is a special guy. We've known each other over 40 years now and have worked on a number of projects together. He is such an incredible talent and an even nicer guy in person!

chippwalters

New video on using the GroupsPro addon to help work on different workplanes.

https://youtu.be/_YZcqzxPV2I

chippwalters

masterxeon1001 showed me some very interesting ways to create dynamic objects in Blender today and I just had to try it out. Cool beans!

https://youtu.be/Wqb4AYUj8Qk

Bryan K

Excellent posts.

chippwalters

Quiet lately as I've taken on an interesting plugin project for Blender.

As many of you may know, Blender doesn't really have a component system like SketchUp. That said, Blender's booleans are much more robust and combined with it's modifiers, it can create a pretty solid kitbashing system. In fact, boolean modeling which heretofore has only been seen in NURBS, is possible (with caveats) in Blender.

To that end, I've partnered with some interesting folks and spearheaded a design for a pretty cool kitbashing tool called KIT OPS. KIT OPS could be used to create doors, windows and all sorts of boolean modifier geometry, but right now we're just doing tech INSERTS (KIT OPS INSERTS = SU COMPONENTS).

One particular neat thing about KIT OPS, is it cuts through an entire object. So, if you're inserting a window or door through a wall, it cuts completely through, unlike SketchUp which only cuts through the first surface, requiring you to manually cut the rest. This also results in KIT OPS having a non-destructive workflow, which makes for a tremendous amount of iterative designs.

Anyway, if you're interested, here's a video explaining it. BTW, the renders in the video were done at 15 sec/frame in Blender 2.8 EEVEE at 4K resolution! FWIW, KIT OPS works in 2.79 not 2.8, but once the plugin API is locked down, we'll do the port. This product should be out this week. I'll post here when it's released, just in case anyone is interested.

https://youtu.be/KzDzQy_WlIM

pilou

A cool one! Bravo!

chippwalters

KIT OPS finally released!

Hey everyone, we just released KIT OPS and if you're interested in non-destructive, hyperdetailed Kitbashing you should check it out at https://kit-ops.com

rv1974

What Ops stands for?

pilou

A French challenger to make Blender more easy and friendly (if possible)!
This one is not so bad!
Very Speedy indeed! (you can put the speed of vidéo to 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpYz_qWlOQk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0r4-BtgYu0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbw0gzQsGgg

http://youtu.be/SJEPbqgPCi0

Pixero

pilou

Will become viral!
Who is the author? (Tarantino disappointed ? or...

rv1974

UI. The main Reason for SketchUp artists NOT to consider Blender

pilou

Effectively, it's a another world!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRtzMIxbmcQ

chippwalters

@glenn at home said:

@rv1974 said:

Sorry but my impression is that this stage architecturalmodelling in Blender is a refined torture. The more Blender promos I see , the more I appreciate SU existance (with all its bottle necks).

I really have to agree with this statement in regards to architectural modeling. The archimesh tool set video seemed very cumbersome and laborious. Now for general 3d modeling Blender is a GREAT option. Still loving these videos.

@rv1974 said:

UI. The main Reason for SketchUp artists NOT to consider Blender

I'd have to say, with emphasis, I agree. Blender 2.79 had this weird right-button mouse click, strange selection methods and overall REQUIRED you to learn literally a hundred keystrokes (no kidding!).

B-U-T.... Blender 2.8 is really nothing like 2.79. They added professional UI designers, who went against all the Blender die hards and created a very simple- likable interface, that works how you would expect. Left click selects. You can drag select objects and polys and edges and verts. Even the navigation model (orbit, pan, zoom) is EXACTLY like SketchUp!

After working with Blender, and modeling in SketchUp, it came to me there's a perfect fit here. Continue to model in SketchUp-- export with textures intact to the new Blender and do crazy fast photoreal renders and animations. I needed to create a course which helped SU users to do ONLY that-- and learn it quickly.

As I said previously, I was BLOWN AWAY by the new Blender 2.8 EEVEE renderer where I can do an 8K render in 15 seconds (yes, you read that right, but it will take about 4 minutes to "bake" the lighting-- but you do that ONLY once). 3 minute animations are done, and color toned, with depth of field, light bloom, full reflections and photoreal in a couple hours. And of course it's all free.

Not to mention you can export your models directly from SketchUp to Blender with the textures and mapping intact. And in Blender you can ADD new materials and textures WITHOUT having to go through the tedious process of UV mapping.

And over the years, I've created over 60 free SketchUp tutorials, but I wanted to make sure this course would be special. I invited some top 3D artists, including the best here on Sketchucation to help test and give advice. The goal is to give you just what you need to import your models, texture them, light them, render them and animate them.

Take this image for example. On the left is the original photo. On the right the one created in Blender (I also used fSpy to match the camera angle-- I have a FREE tutorial on how to do that at https://gumroad.com/chippwalters ).

So, if you're interested, check the course out. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

https://youtu.be/H4MUpsTH3X4

Glenn at home

Hey Chipp, I am starting to play a bit with SU2Blender. I brought in a model I did for a builder many years ago and just hit render to see what I get. I am seeing some "artifacts" in the basic render. Any ideas?
TIA

Glenn