Not sure what the issue is there. A temporary work around for now would be to go to File->Export->2D Graphic to save your view as an image (if need be in the bottom right corner of the dialog box that pops up you can adjust your options like resolution and such). That way you can print the image using photoshop or the windows viewer or whatever.

-Brodie

Looks like a good setup to me. I had the 8800 GT for awhile, I think you'll be very happy with it (and it plays quite nicely with SU). I'd probably ditto the advice on waiting for Windows 7. And if you anticipate wanting some more ram later of course it'd be a good idea to go w/ a 64 bit OS as 32 bit won't recognize any more than the 4GB you've got.

-Brodie

Here's my go. Spent about an hour on it and then did a bit of post processing. Did 2 lighting schemes through the magic of Maxwell's multilight feature. Rendered it for 36 minutes at 1000x750. I normally don't go the sinister route but this guy had it coming.

Lights off...

Lights on...

-Brodie

ahh, maybe the background was my fatal flaw. By turning off the sun you're saying just turn off SU shadows? I did that but it was still pretty well lit, I didn't change the background though so maybe that's the trick.

-Brodie

very nice. dig the style and it fits well with the building

So is there a way to turn off the sun altogether in podium? I guess I was assuming there must be but I'm surprised no one has chimed in on that.

-Brodie

Good call, that's exactly what the problem is with mine. I created a huge emitter plane and placed it in front of the "building". It's not that far behind the camera. So I was getting daylight bleeding around the edges of my emitter which made the boxes around the perimeter brighter. I noticed the same thing but couldn't figure it out until you brought it up. I should have turned by big box enclosure on for the "day" rendering too so I wasn't getting any sunlight, only the light from my emitter. That should have evened it out.

You can open up the SU model to see what I'm talking about.

-Brodie

I haven't used Podium very much so there may be a better way to do some of the stuff (couldn't figure out how to get a dark scene, for example, without enclosing the whole model in a box). I used the Color by Layer image to save a selection of the glass and another of the window lip, then used those selections to make the appropriate masks (as you'll see in the photoshop file). Then I went back with either a black or white brush at varying opacities to reveal more or less of the lit areas on the bottom layer to give the effect that all the windows were lit to different intensities.

Also note that when you make the Color by Layer image (which you get to via the little arrow in the upper right corner of the Layers pallete) that you should also turn the edges off to get a better selection.

I also changed the color of the light emitter to a sort of brownish orange which if I recall affects the hue of light emitted so that it would look more incandescent.

Think that's about it. Glad I was able to finally give this a try. Now I'm interested to see how well this would work in something like Maxwell or another unbiased renderer...

-Brodie

Welp, I couldn't resist taking a crack at it. Here's my version

Here are the associated files

The photoshop file
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/384281/Night%20Lighting/Light%20test.psd

And the SU file
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/384281/Night%20Lighting/test%20int%20shadow.skp

hrm...interesting catch. Maybe you could do the window lip on both the daylight and night renders and use a low opacity eraser to erase the night rendered lip, thus uncovering the daylight lip until it looks right (otherwise you might end up with the opposite problem, the lip being too bright).

It does seem to be getting more complicated though doesn't it. My guess is that the trade off for manageable render times will be some realism. However, with podium or another biased renderer that might not matter quite so much.

-Brodie

Great, can't wait to see the results! Note that one of the things I'm not sure about is how to handle the glass. If it's turned on in the "skinless" render and then adjusted in post-processing will it look right? I'm not sure.

-Brodie

I'd be interested in seeing how Ecuadorian's idea would work out. I've had the same idea before but haven't given it a shot. Here's how it goes in my head.

Render interior with the building's 'skin' layer turned off. Use daylighting. the glass should probably be turned on though, not sure.

Render your night shot with no interior lights

Save an unrendered image from the same SU perspective in "color by layer" mode (all window glass must be on a separate layer)

in Photoshop set up those 3 images on seperate layers with 'color by layer' on top and the skinless layer on bottom.

use 'color by layer' to make a good selection of the window glass and use that selection to either delete or mask out the windows from the night shot layer (effectively revealing the interior shown on the layer below)

Finally adjusting the brightness and hue of the interior until it looks right. A photo filter might be appropriate here so it looks like it's being lit by incandecents instead of sunlight (or instead of daylight you could have rendered it with 1 large incandecent type light)

I'd probably also go back and unmask some of the windows so it doesn't look like ALL the lights are on.

Like I said, it works in my head but I've never had the opportunity to test it out. If anyone has done something like this I'd love to see the results.

-Brodie

Yeah, the worst part about doing this sort of thing for money is that sometimes with clients there's just no accounting for taste. What can you do?! Wish I had time to just do pretty kitchen renderings and bathrooms like you see all over the rendering forums. Just can't figure out why these people take so much time to render those sorts of things. Are they making money on it? Who's paying all this money for bathroom images? Oh well, some of us are stuck doing exteriors of not so interesting buildings like banks and hospitals - could be worse.

-Brodie

Looking pretty good. So you export 3d people?

There's a confusing area just to the right of the guy in the center of the image (standing to the right of the 2 silver cars). It looks like there's a building shadow or something coming away from the building towards the lower right corner of the image, however elsewhere it looks like the sun is in front of the building and to the left. Any idea what that is?

-Brodie

along with honolulu's comments above about the view outside the window, the perspective is off as well. The left side should be scrunched down quite a bit (sort of like how the glass butt glazing converges on the left side.

-brodie

Can you be more specific? Are you talking about being an architect or just having architecture (ie. not living in caves)?

-Brodie

@thomthom said:

@unknownuser said:

Richard,

I'm trying to wrap my head around the benefits of your method here. So the advantage is that now you will be able to place your HDRI visually in SU before exporting? Are there any other advantages? I tend to do a decent amount of work within maxwell studio (lighting, hdr, even placing trees and cars), so it sounds like this isn't really something that I would use, right? Or am I missing anything?

-Brodie

Not sure how things work in Maxwell, but if you use V-Ray for Sketchup, which runs from within SU and doesn't export anything this is a good aid to set the HDRI position as there are no visual aid provided. VfSU simply asks for offset values.

Yeah, sounds pretty much like Maxwell. However, there's also the option to make a Maxwell Scene file which allows you to open up the model in Maxwell's "studio" program and make adjustments. You can't really do any serious modeling there but you can visually adjust the HDRI, camera location, textures and such. Skipping that step would be nice but I haven't found it easy enough to make it worth it. Beyond HDRI work arounds there are also lighting issues, polycount issues, camera view issues etc. There are work arounds for most of the problems, as I say, but taking into account the extra time/work required and the extra issues they sometimes bring up, I just do all of that in the Studio. That's not perfect either but I've found it more reliable in my own work.

-Brodie

Richard,

I'm trying to wrap my head around the benefits of your method here. So the advantage is that now you will be able to place your HDRI visually in SU before exporting? Are there any other advantages? I tend to do a decent amount of work within maxwell studio (lighting, hdr, even placing trees and cars), so it sounds like this isn't really something that I would use, right? Or am I missing anything?

-Brodie

If you can find a great deal on the 3.2 it'd definately help SU out a bit but I think they're running about $600 more expensive than the 2.66's right now. For that kind of money you could probably overclock and burn through 2 2.66's and by that time the i7's will be going for 6 cereal box tops.

-Brodie

Yeah, I think you're right. Postprocessing might be your best bet in a crunch. One thing I didn't think to mention yesterday for future reference is that I also scale the HDR image. If the HDR is in the reflection area of the environment mapping then it should be being reflected but my guess is that at that camera distance and that reflection angle all you're probably getting is the area where the clouds meet the horizon, which based on the HDR in the background, doesn't really have any color variation. To get anything at all you'd probably have to use an HDR that actually has a ground plane and some trees, which even if you wanted to try I wouldn't be much help with. I haven't found any that I'm real happy with yet.

But anyway, like I was saying, I usually rescale the HDR. The default is 1 which means it wraps the HDR all the way around the sphere. I find that usually you can increase that number and get better results (ie. crisper clouds that don't seem all stretched out). I'm not sure what the magic number is for radsky017, probably something like 5-7. Only problem with rescaling is that you have to watch out for tiling because it's going to tile your HDR 5-7 times around the sphere and you may see that in your reflections - takes some test renders and tweeking. For the background image sometimes I'll check the Map to Screen box or whatever it is - that way the HDR isn't stretched out so you don't have to worry so much about pixelation if it's a lower res hdr. I usually check the Disable box for illumination and let the physical sky do that. All of that stuff could probably be prevented if I could either find some decent real HDRI images or wasn't too cheap to pay for them. Oh well.

By the way. Is your glass going to have mullions or is it all butt-glazed or what? Also do you have a trick for how you layed out all of your grass clipmaps? I've yet to find a perfect way to use that method, especially around curves like the curb area in your foreground.

-Brodie