I've just started working with this. I may be adding too many rules at this point but it's been working for me. Basically you place a bunch of low polygon trees into your seen which are components named "tree" or "MapleTree01" or something like that (I think it might need to be all 1 word w/ no spaces). Then you bring in your high poly tree and make it a component named "tree_proxy" or "MapleTree01_proxy" depending on what you named your low poly trees. You can then delete the high poly if you want, the important thing is just that it is "in your model" ie. if you go to your components "In Model" list, it'll show up there. I recomend not deleting it though but rather putting it on a layer and just turning that layer off. That way you can still purge and you won't lose it.

Now when you export your model make sure to click the Proxy box in the export options dialogue. It's next to Protect, Transform, and a few other options. That should do it.

-Brodie

one way would be to make a box w/ the same width and height as the opening you want. then move it so that it intersects with your wall in the location you want your opening. Select the geometry of either the box or the wall or both, right click, and hit Intersect. What that does is create a line where the faces intersect. Now you can delete the unwanted geometry (from the box and the part of the wall you don't want) and you should be left w/ an opening in your wall.

-Brodie

Anyone know of a Rhino 3dm importer? The only one I've found cost $200 which is way too much.

-Brodie

Tomsdesk,

That's funny about the architect not liking the changes. I've had the same experience a number of times. Usually I'll have a nifty idea or find a look that I really like at the time but by the time I come to my senses the client has decided he'll have none of my updates.

Interesting technique on the site. I just did something on a current project that seems to have worked well so far. There was a dramatic shift in elevation in one portion but elsewhere it wasn't as drastic.
This gave me the idea to have 2 flat planes, one lower in front of the building and a raised one which happens to be in the back of the building. I grouped each of those and then created a contoured plane connecting the 2 via the sandbox tools.

I had a flat site plan (which someone else had created from CAD previously) so I placed that above my new contoured site (2 flat planes and 1 contoured) and used the drape tool to drape the flat site onto each of my 3 areas. The 2D areas are easy enough to push/pull the elevation difference for grass/curbs/etc. The tricky part will be changing levels on the contoured part. My plan is to copy the street down 6" in the z direction and then erase the original. The time consuming part will be having to make all the connecting lines so those 2 planes connect (ie. creating the sides of the curbs).

Another thought just came to me though. I wonder if I could offset a line 1/16" to the inside of the road and then just move the road down the 6". There will be a very slight slant to the curb but that's no biggy. hrm...

-Brodie

-Brodie

I have to agree w/ you Kwist on the development of SU by google. I think the product they've been putting out is great for the standard/free version but I'd like to see the Pro version really be for "Pro's"

At my office we're currently looking into incorporating Rhino as an alternative and rendering in Maxwell. Not quite sure what we'll be doing for animations yet though.

-Brodie

Here's a free one, just used it today. It's faceflattener019.rb

301 Moved Permanently

(www.sketchucation.com)

-Brodie

What were you going off of for the proposed stuff (as opposed to the existing site and such)?

I tend to work on projects that aren't so different in scale. I do hospitals so typically there is less site but more building than what you're showing. My models are also done in the design phase though so it's not just a one shot deal. One model I did has taken over a year (not because it's so great, just because it keeps changing). I'd say that regards to time, if it took 80 hours primarily because of the quality of information (and misinformation) you had then that's fairly reasonable. Likewise, if there were changes in the middle of modeling, same thing. If you felt like your info was reasonable and it took you that amount of time just plugging away in SU, then I'd have to say that would seem long to me.

My other guess would be that the 8' grade change probably caused you some fits. If not, let me know your secret. For me the buildings are a breeze in SU. However, I cringe everytime I see a lot of contour lines on my site plan. I'm working w/ one of those currently I'm afraid.

I think for a "glorified study model" your quality seems pretty good. Same comment as above in regards to color. The site looks good but the building seems a bit off. I'd also agree in regards to the metal roof. Details would go a long way there and you'd have some nice shadows to show for the effort. I'm not a big fan of dark windows in SU but that's just me. I use an image of a sky as my window texture to give the impression of being able to see some reflection. I'd go either abstract/cartoony or hand colored though if you do that as a real sky image looks odd. Also dittos on the lines in the road. Looks a bit chaotic out there.

I'd also recommend toning down the variety of car colors too. At least less saturation would be good. I've experimented w/ using a white or gray transparent material for all my cars before too w/ good effect. That way the focus is brought back to the building but you've still got the scale there for reference.

Good job,

-Brodie

Are you trying to import a .dwg of your elevation files? Which version of CAD are you using?

-Brodie

Hrm...what other secrets are you hiding from me then?

-Brodie

I ran across this brick texture maker the other day. Just started using it and it seems really cool so far. It's a program from Acme brick company that's for architects w/ special attention given to renderers (or SU model builders).

http://www.brick.com/md/index.htm

Basically you download the (free) program and it'll let you pick from a very wide list of bricks (I think it's got some CMU blocks and such too) from 4 different manufacturers. You can also select from a wide variety of mortor colors. You select how big of a sample size you want (ie. how many bricks wide and high) and can select individual rows to be soldier course, change individual brick colors (to make a darker colored horizontal band for example), etc.

You can then save your sample as an image (I spit out a 25x25 brick sample and the resolution was 2688x1344 but you can up that by as much as 200% I think or reduce it). Plus it automatically spits out a bump map! I'm not sure that it bumps the bricks but it'll at least give you white bricks w/ black for the mortar areas.

I ran a quick rendering in maxwell and come up w/ the image below. I found a minor tiling issue (you'll see on both sides a mortar line that runs vertically from top to bottom). In fairness though I think that's intentional (ie. a control joint), which is pretty awesome and shouldn't be hard to get rid of if it's undesired.

-Brodie

really interesting feature Solo. Do you have a rendering where you've used that ecosystem?

-Brodie

btw, if you look close enough around the trees (like the very bottom right of my image) you can see the clip mapped grass which looks rather pixelated. easy enough to touch up in photoshop though.

2Kemon, so far the grass doesn't seem to be very dependent on the viewpoint and it works quite well from mid to far range. I used the regular grass texture for the bottom plane and the same texture for the top plane w/ the bump map as the clip map. I had to up the brightness on the clipmap by 25%-50% for it to clip out the right amount of grass from the top plane.

-Brodie

Kwist, out of curiosity what sort of file sizes are you talking about?

-Brodie

anyone gotten much into Picasa here? I saw a couple things on it on the basecamp youtube videos and was pretty impressed. Most of the examples on the website were less than stellar but I went ahead and downloaded the trial and it seemed pretty nifty. I never got very far into it though.

-Brodie

What are your guys' opinions on png vs tiff then? I've been using png's for awhile but someone mentioned that they preferred tif's because you can associate a particular color profile w/ the image.

-Brodie

Here's my little test. Those are Solo's palm trees by the way.

-Brodie

I tested out the 2 planes using a bump map just brightened up a bit as the clip plane and it worked out much better than I expected! A little funky around the trees and such where you can sort of see the top plane but otherwise it's wonderful. Most of my renderings are of very large buildings to I was looking for a mid to long range solution and I think this should work out quite well. It seems to give it just enough variety and shadow to help give the illusion of more depth than is really there. Thanks for the original tip.

Any other tips particular to SU -> Maxwell that might come in handy? Right now I'm working on my first interior rendering. Looking ok but not as well as I'd hoped. My lighting seemed much weaker than I thought but luckily I was able to help that out in Multilight. And the glass seemed to make things noisier than I'd have hoped. The best that I've run across for speed is ags dielectric. Any other advice there?

Thanks Richard,

-Brodie

Really great stuff. I've been doing a lot of architectural models for buildings out in California so these will be extremely helpful. Best palm trees I'll have in my library! Thanks,

-Brodie

it's also sometimes necessary to make hidden lines visible when applying textures to odd or curved surfaces. You'll be painting smaller segments but if SU gets confused when painting on curves sometimes this is necessary.

-Brodie