Cool, thanks for the resource. Looks like it should be very helpful. We've gotten some trees and cars from Dosch but actually the trees are all messed up.

Right now we've been doing SU animations so we've gotten by w/o real animation but since we're upgrading to rendered flythroughs it seemed like a good idea to have more options than less. Anything to add some extra cool factor.

-Brodie

I think I ended up settling on 3D Max after all. I played a bit with Vue and C4D but in the end I really needed something now and I didn't have enough time to test them to determine whether or not they'd be sufficient for everything I'll need to do in the future. 3D Max was my safe choice because I know it does everything.

-Brodie

works great, thanks!

I can only ditto this I'm afraid. I've run into the same problem and haven't found the solution yet either. I'll keep you posted if I find out anything as I'm going to be running into this problem again shortly with a brick texture.

-brodie

Hrm, never used unglue before. You can also use the directional keyboard keys to lock to a particular axis (Up=Blue Right=Red Left=Green). This is very different from what Chris was suggesting though. With this method anything that is glued will stay glued and the glued edges will come along for the ride (I use this technique a lot for this reason). Use whichever method best suits your needs.

-Brodie

Quick Maxwell render. Didn't really do anything special, tweaked the concrete material a bit and ran it for an hour @ 2000x1500

-Brodie

Yeah, it was a bit difficult finding a good view. The original rendering I did...

...was from a further angle however it made the building look even longer than it should. I chose the more straight on view for the final to relieve some of this problem. I was limited partly in that I needed to show the front entry. We were also trying to show the relationship between the proposed building and the existing, which you see on the far left side of the final image. I could have probably chosen better camera properties, but I'm not sure, given all the things we wanted to do with 1 image, that I'd be able to alter the position of the camera much.

-Brodie

Good point about the perspective. I probably could have fixed that up a bit in photoshop.

I'll have to ponder on the lighting comment. I'm a bit hesitant since the scene is all lit and calculated by Maxwell's physical sky properties so it should be pretty realistic. But looking better is always more important than looking more realistic so it's worth a shot. I'll keep that in mind.

-Brodie

My latest work. Modeling done in SU7, rendered w/ Maxwell, and then post-processed w/ Photoshop CS4

C&C are welcome. I was satisfied w/ most of this project. The main thing I wasn't happy with was the grass. I was going to try some displacement grass but ran out of time. The building, which is EIFS, is also a bit flat, needs some more texture to it. Same goes for the road as well. The building isn't my design, I just rendered it for the company I'm with. With a bit more time I would have also added some motion blur to the car in the foreground as well as the helicopter.

-Brodie

I'm up for trying anything. I would like, however, to hear why people prefer a particular software over another and/or any cons of it. I've heard of both Blender and Artlantis and have seen great things from each but part of my problem is that I don't really have time to try every photorealistic software out there to the extent that they'd all have a fair shake. I'm really hoping to widdle it down to a few.

What would also be helpful is if you have any good links to well done architectural animations done in any given program.

-Brodie

Our company has moved from doing our renderings w/ SU and Photoshop to now rendering them with Maxwell. What I'm still lacking, though, is a way to do rendered animations. We only design hospitals so the buildings are quite large, however I'm also hoping to find something that handles trees, sky, and animated cars well in an animation. What would you guys suggest?

Vue is really intriguing right now, going to get a trial of it. It looks like it handles environments like no other, but environments aren't my focus so I'm not sure if it's the right tool for me. Any thoughts on that or anything else out there?

I've also dabbled w/ 3D Max. It does everything and seems to be the industry 'go to' but I'm not totally sold on it either. Big learning curve and we don't do a lot of animations so I won't get to use it every day. We rarely do animations now (and when we do they're straight SketchUp w/ a bit of video work) but when we start rendering them I'm sure we'll do more. Nevertheless, I can'd see doing more than maybe 1 a month tops.

-Brodie

Great job! It's working great now.

BTW, there's still some purging that can be done and the option for shadows to be displayed "On Faces" is turned off.

Great model

-Brodie

20/20 sounds familiar. I worked at Menard's home improvement store for awhile and did a lot of work in the kitchens area. Is this perhaps the kitchen design program I was using? It's been awhile since I've used it.

-Brodie

Quite disappointing. I was sort of excited when I saw the original image. Anyone have a similar city model they'd like to share? I looked a bit on the warehouse but didn't run across anything very appealing.

-Brodie

@kwistenbiebel said:

@pibuz said:

Maybe overexposing something isn't such a bad affair, as I tend to think.. And a lighter atmosphere won't harm either..

I think the most important thing is that your image has a wide range going from full white 255,255,255 to full black 0,0,0.
That doesn't always mean the image would be overexposed (unless it is the effect you are after).
Overexposed would be having too much areas in the image going full 255,255,255 white.

Kwist, you're referring to the final output colors, not the material colors right?

-Brodie

I had an architect ask me to do some side work for him awhile back and had good luck w/ sending skp files. He was a bit older and not very computer savy but has been able to at least open up the model and orbit and zoom around w/ the tools. I'm not worried about him taking the model elsewhere because he wouldn't be able to do it himself. I guess if he had an employee that could do the work he could "steal" it but then he probably just would have had that person do it initially (I'm not designing anything mind you, just taking his CAD drawings into SU).

It was actually quite aways into the project before I even met him. I emailed him the link to the google download site and he followed the instructions. One thing I do to help him out is to create scenes that don't affect the camera but will do things like turn shadows on (and another to turn them off). And I'll put in a few different camera angles in case he gets trapped in a wall or gets stuck while zooming/orbiting.

Maybe 3d PDF's have been improved but I had bad luck w/ them. The geometry was ok but no materials as I recall.

I'll also typically send him a few jpg.s because his computer is really old and my model got pretty big. That way even if his computer wasn't able to handle the model he still had something to look at.

-Brodie

@bigstick said:

1. Multi-core support has been dealt with before. It won't help SketchUp because it relies on the program being able to divide a task into a series of distinct parts. There are actually few things that the application does which rely on heavy processing of a single task. For Ruby and things like sandbox activities - sure. For general modelling - no, not really. It will not help with smooth orbiting and navigation of large/complex models. John Bacus's interview, referred to elsewhere on the forum - too lazy to find the link) was quite succinct in this regard. It isn't possible to predict every possible course of action and calculate and cache it. Yes it is the future, but it the application doesn't lend itself to the technology, there is no point.

Can anyone who believes this explain it to me in layman's terms? I've fairly computer savy and have read the interview mentioned but it just doesn't make sense to me. When you orbit around a model with a lot of polygons, for example, you're likely to encounter some bogginess. So if SU isn't using even 100% of 1 processor then what's slowing it down? And if SU IS using every bit of 1 processor then why wouldn't it benefit from having even more processor speed to grab onto?

-Brodie

In particular I'm looking for some good dirt and mulch textures. I'm doing exterior architectural renderings and I'm trying to find some good textures for around the base of the building where bushes and small trees are planted. I've searched some of my online texture resources but I'm not finding what I need. I'd like some dark brown, almost black dirt, but most of the dirt I find is really light, like it could sustain no life at all because it's so dry. And I've found some ok mulch textures but it's usually of a very small sample area like 2'x2'. At that size if it's tileable there's just no variation at all which looks weird to me. Plus what you often find in real life is more like a dirt area which just a bit of mulch on top (as opposed to all dirt or all mulch) and I've yet to find a texture like that.

Any suggestions or textures you can share?

-Brodie

Cool. I figured there was a reason I turned it off As I recall it also grouped everything as one big object too which I didn't like because I'd occassionally like to move a car around or make some adjustments in Maxwell.

-Brodie

I'm not sure I can help there. I THINK they come up as instances w/ my settings but I'm not real sure to be honest. I've never had to worry too much whether they were or weren't. Under geometry I have the following boxes checked: instances, transformations, separate by material, and proxy objects (all except protect). With those settings I can't select my proxy high geometry instances in Maxwell, which I GUESS means they're instances?

-Brodie