@chris fullmer said:

Hey, that looks pretty good there Al! Is it only for autocad, or is it also for the other autodesk apps like 3dsmax?

We are making the Import App for AutoCAD. The SKP stuff, after import, should work OK with the rendering exports - since we export the UV coordinates during the RENDER command. But we haven't written an importer just for 3DsMax yet.

We are planning to write a SKP and 3D Warehouse importer for the AccuRender nXt renderers for AutoCAD and REVIT, and also add it to IRender nXt for people who want to import 3D Warehouse stuff (or other SKP files) directly into the renderer, rather than having to place it into a model first.

@pbacot said:

I notice the shadow on the house seems to become a part of the texture in AutoCAD Or is this shadow part of the MatchPhoto. Don't use ACAD but this could be great.

The Shadow was probably part of the PhotoMatch image.

We recently became aware of the AutoCAD App to import SKP files into AutoCAD

SketchUp Import

It works pretty well for a lot of things, but there are some things - such as PhotoMatch materials, textures which have been rotated, skewed or scaled, and images which do not work well at all.

We are working on a new version which will solve many of these problems.

Let me know if you see a use for a better import tool.

Here is a SketchUp model with some of these things which tend to create problems:

Here is the AutoCAD model after import of this SKP with the standard SketchUp Import App

• The trees are faces in SketchUp with an Alpha Texture. The faces come in, but without transparency.

• The round clock on the front wall in SketchUp is an Image entity in SketchUp, and not loaded at all by the standard importer

• The textures on the house are a PhotoMatch - where a single image is positioned in SketchUp on multiple faces - and are not positioned properly in AutoCAD

Here is the AutoCAD model after import with our new version:

@gaieus said:

You seem to have found it already: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sketchup-pro-jobs/uU1dzuV6o88

Yes - thanks - but it might be more useful to post things here on SketchUcation. People who do not know about the Google Groups page may never see it.

@toynlet said:

Hi Guys

Apologise if this is posted in the wrong section but I thought asking people who use different packages and regularly produce high quality photorealistic renders would be the best to ask for a bit of advice!
Steve

There are some sample SketchUp renderings, from various rendering packages, on this site:

Sample Models and Renderings | SketchUp Rendering

Examples of SketchUp rendering from different plugins and tips to get started.

SketchUp Rendering | SketchUp Rendering Tools and Insight (sketchuprendering.com)

I think my main observation of them is that all the packages can product good renderings one the user spends a little time learning how t set things up.

The Jobs listing on Jim's SketchUp blog seems to continue to be unused.

Does SketchUCation have a place to list employment opportunities?

Or is there someplace else in the SketchUp community?

The model.modified? method determines if the Model has been modified since the last save.[/quote]

Thanks for the quick response TIG.

That would work if there was a "saved" Observer, (so I could remember that the model had been saved, and set a semiphore to remember that it had been saved) (It wouldn't hurt to re-run my routine once per save)

Also, the changes I make after performing my check for changes would set the modified? tag, and confuse me. (and I don't want to reset the modified? value, or to save the model)

We have some code we want to run whenever a user starts a function, but the model has changed since the last time it was started.

• Either by using SketchUp "New", or "Open", or by adding new geometry.

We have been using two "tricks" to determine if the model has changed since we last checked it.

1. We write a UUID as an attribute to the model, then check to see if the UUID has changed.

• that catches New and Open. But can get messed up if the model is saved with a new name, for example, and changed, saved, and then then first model is loaded, so we added #2.

2. We remember the name and path of the model and check it to see if it has changed.

3. We plan to remember the number of entities in the model as well, so we can tell when new entities have been added. (But, of course, this will not catch those cases where one entity was deleted and one new entity was added)

It does not hurt for us to run the routine we run when the model has changed - but it can take a few seconds, (or longer), so we don't want to run it too often.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to determine if the model has been changed?

We sent out a rendering tip today about White Walls.

Boothy pointed out that you can also make quick adjustments to walls using the Material/Color channels feature.

Here is a rendering of a house which we used for our first Webinar;

By clicking on the material in the back wall, you can select Change Color

This brings up a Wizard which lets you make changes to the color of a material after rendering.

Here I changed it to HSL (rather than RGB) mode, which lets you set the luminance of the color directly. And used the slider bar to move it more towards white.

I was able to adjust the wall with the slider until I got a lighter effect.

Note Material Channels does not re-render the model, so if you change the color too much, any anti-aliasing at the edge of the color will not be changed properly, and also any reflections of a color will not be changed. But it can be a good idea for Walls.

See: Material Channels

@gaieus said:

Hehe. You got me. I should go back to school.

Does IRender do displacement mapping? I did not know that, great!

Yes - but we haven't found a great use for it yet. We worked on a ruby to create bump maps and displacement maps from SketchUp models. Basically you render the scene - say a wall with 3D depth - or a window treatment - of rocks - with a camera point straight on - in OpenGL - but save a greyscale image using the Z-depth for the intensity, and then use it as a bump map or displacement map. (This could be done purely in Ruby as well by getting the Z-distance at each pixel and creating an image using the Z-distances for greyscale intensity)

It was hard to find a good example for it. e.g. Background windows which would have many fewer faces in SketchUp - but still render will from different angles because of the mapping.

Here is a sample from of the image from the procedure - which we wrote for experimentation but never put into a product.

The problem was creating a SketchUp model good enough to use for the bump maps. A brick wall would be easy - but it also easy to create a decent bump map for brick using Paint.

So you need a more complex sculptured surface - or rocks. When we asked at the time no one could supply a good model of rocks which would be useful for creating a bump map or displacement map image.

And you even alphabetized everything - except things that start with I - like Instancing.

Thanks for inspiring me - I have added 3 of these to the Sage site already.

Double Sided materials

Displacement Mapping

Alpha Mask Rendering

Feel free to add criticisms, or other ideas.

@frederik said:

Why are the reflections so pixel-ated (if that's the right term)...?

This was rendered with a very low resolution HDRi sky. The idea here was to have imprecise reflections, which do not represent any actual object. The HDRi is actually a forest, with light filtering through - but we didn't want to see the actual trees and leaves - but rather a generic impression of shadows and highlights. (I think it works well when placed in the warehouse setting. Because the highlights are imprecise, the eye might imagine they come from the lights in the warehouse)

If you render with a higher resolution HDRi sky, you get more precise reflections.

The purpose of the example here, however, was to show the effect of the Alpha Mask in the image.

Alpha Mask Rendering

I am familiar with creating a rendering which fills the alpha channel of the .PNG image wherever there is background.

This makes it easy to place the rendering in front of a background in PhotoShop.

However, some other renderers have a different definition

From Kerkythea:

[pre:2ik0fsac]Mask Render (Alpha Mask)

Renders a black and white image for a selected object in the scene representing
the spatial relationship of the selected object to its field. This is commonly
used in conjunction with a photo editing program in order to ‘mask’ an object
using the mask render in the ‘Alpha’ channel.[/pre:2ik0fsac]

And from Pheoonix Viewer:P

[pre:2ik0fsac]Alpha Mask Rendering: These option control when alpha masking should be
used in an attempt to mitigate the well known alpha sorting issue, in which
prims behind other prims may appear to flicker in front. Please note that enabling
this can have side effects of its own, since as objects not rendering at all.[/pre:2ik0fsac]

These both imply that the alpha channel is applied to individual objects rather than the whole scene.

Can you add any insight?

Thanks for these ideas. They are well thought out.

I have been working on the Rendering Terms section of the SketchUp Sage site. (Brought over from the former SuWiki)

These are for all forms of rendering - SU OpenGL, Photorealistic, Non-Photorealistic.

What ideas do you have that would be good additions to the list. And if you take a look at them and want to suggest improvements let me know (Or volunteer to help edit the SketchUp Sage site)

Al

Here are the terms we have now (not all the write-ups are complete)

A
Alpha Channel
Ambient Light
Anti-Aliasing
B
Batch Rendering
Bump Mapping
C
Caustics
Clay Rendering
Cove Lighting
D
Depth of Field
E
Edge Highlighting
F
Fog
Fractal Plants
G
Global Illumination
Glow
H
HDRi
I
Indirect Lighting
L
Lighting Channels
M
Mirror
Morphing
Motion Blur
N
Non-Photorealistic Rendering
Normal
O
OpenGL
P
Panorama
Perspective
Photorealistic
R
Radiosity
Ray Trace
Reflection
Refraction
Renderer
Rendering
RPC Objects
S
Section Plane
Shading
Shadows
Silhouette
Soft Shadow
Solid Materials
Specular Reflection
T
Texture Mapping
Translucency
Transparency
X
X-Ray
Z
Z-Fighting

@conks01 said:

Hi,

I was wondering which product out there can both render, and allow animation of the scenes.

Thanks.

IRender nXt does a nice animation using the SketchUp scenes and timings.

Try out our 30 day free trial

@cotty said:

Nice examples of different shadows! One question: is there a reason why the walls in the shadows are not dark anymore when the soft shadows are applied (second image)?

We added an option to show shadows on "shadows and surfaces in shade" or "shadows only"

Basically, with the second option, surfaces which do not face the sun, and wold not be lit by the sun even if nothing else cast a shadow on them, are ignored for the second option.

Here is a Sketchy Shadow version with shadows on "shadows and surfaces in shade".
(Also I changed the scale on the hatch pattern to have more white space between lines)

Last week at Basecamp we ran into a lot of people who were interested in NPR renderings.

I took your church and ran it through our Soft Shadows and Sketchy Shadows stuff since it makes a good example of Sketchy Shadows from our NprTools add-on.

Here is the Church, in SketchUp, with a Sketchy Edges style - the shadows sometimes seem harsh with Sketchy Edges:

We then create a "soft Shadow" image:

This is not as much "rocket science" as we like to pretend. What we do is change the date and time, save several shadow images, and then merge them all together. You can get a smoother soft-shadows image by requesting more intermediate shadow images. However, for Sketchy Shadows - the next image - it actually works better with a coarser soft-shadows image.

This next part, Sketchy Shadows part, was pretty clever, (I think at least). We replaced all the materials in the entire model with a sketchy hatch pattern, saved that images as well and then blended it with the soft shadows image to create a Sketchy shadows effect.

Note how that placing the sketchy pattern materal on the SketchUp model causes the hatch lines to be at different angles for different surface planes. You can get a similar sketchy shadow effect just using a watermark applied over the image. But I think that having the hatch patterns at different angles makes a better effect.

Here is a zoom of part of the image so you can see the patterns better:

Here is the model with hatch on all surfaces which was then merged with the shadow images. (This is pretty ugly, but I included it for people who want to try something like this themselves.) We actually made two of these images - with the hatch patterns in different directions and then merged them, based on the intensity of the soft shadows image to achieve the cross-hatch vs single line hatch cross-over in the final image.

I made a new image of a spaceship from the 3D Warehouse to demonstrate rendering of Edge Lines.Edge lines can be important for detail. (Especially for items like wood cabinets where the detail is important.)

There are two ways to render Edge Lines - You can extract an image from SketchUp of just the edge lines, and then paste it on top of the rendered image or you can create 3D geometry from the edge lines, and add it to the model before rendering.

This first image uses full 3D geometry for the Edge Lines. The full 3D edge lines are reflected properly in other geometry. The overlay of SketchUp edge lines would not be visible in reflections.

Here is the same scene rendered without edge lines.

If you wanted edge lines for just part of the model, could identify which edge lines you wanted - e.g. by color - and then include only those edge lines.

Thanks - The RpTreeMaker is for Windows only.

However, we have created about 50 trees with it and stored them on the 3D Warehouse. You can load these into SketchUp and use them as is. These are 2D trees with a shawod mask to create good shadows.

RpTreeMaker trees on the 3D Warehouse

See this other thread: Library of Trees for RpTreemaker