@sk8er6 said:

I've tried going over a few times,manually closing what I thought were the holes, using make faces, intersecting with model, <snip>
Thanks for your time,

-sk8er6

I find it's easier when you use solid inspector if you turn on xray mode-- that way you can see the context of the borders much better, plus you can edit as well in xray mode.

I actually really do like the SketchFX extension. If I had to get only one, I'd get the AO one as it helps you design by accurately showing you what the object looks like. Both give you the ability to create some really nice and quick renders and animations. I don't see this as a presentation tool to show finished work, I'd prefer something like Thea or Unity or KeyShot for that.

@caul said:

It's actually quite straight forward to construct a "canonical" entasis in Sketchup for any type of column - smooth or fluted. <snip>

I've done two different tutorials on Flowify and even I had a hard time following this, but it is an ingenious use of the tool!

Some more stuff...

This tambour was located on the South side of the Alamo and used 4lb cannons to defend the South and East.

Gary Zaboly's map of the entire Alamo compound as it existed in 1836

The SketchUp model of the tambour

A quick SU SketchFX video of same:

@cuttingedge said:

I so love the 3d print.. how the texture came out is amazng ..Are the colors there right of the 3d print or is it repainted manually.. What kind of printer will give me this detailed output? Very well done...

Yes the colors are correct. I added a dirt layer and ambient occlusion layer in Substance Painter. I used Shapeways.com to print it. Cost about $150. You can find out more about the Z-Corp printers half way down this page. They're fairly expensive. I think they start at around $60K.

@mike amos said:

Have you thought about making this a card/paper project? Much cheaper and sales could be greater.

That's a great idea! Are there SketchUp plugins/tools that can do this?

Finally got the 3D color print back and it looks wonderful.

Great! Thanks for such a quick reply.

Ugh. Getting old...

Turns out I commissioned such a plugin from Jim Fultz over 10 years ago and just now discovered it. I created a post on it as well. Vertex tools is better.

https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323%26amp;t=64554%26amp;p=592146#p592146

Lightwave and other toolkits have a "MERGE" command which when applied to an entire mesh (selected) will go through and try and weld vertices together within a specific threshold. Anyone know of such a plugin for SU? Thanks

Working on the texturing. All are Unity renders.

@pbacot said:

Pretty advanced stuff (and a lot of work). So you turn the image of the detailed mesh into a texture to apply to the simplified model?

I actually turn it into a single normal map, which when applied, adds a lot of detail to the model. It also creates texture targets in the low poly model allowing me to quickly add diffuse maps for parts and pieces of the single OBJ. There's a video on the process:

Some more front detailing. The statues were quite the challenge as they started off as huge Zbrush files. I dropped them into 3D Coat, voxelized them and began to close all gaps I could find. I then converted them to surfaces, and 3D Coat has this cool tool called Object-ify (separate) which separates a mesh into only contiguous pieces. There's always junk lying around, and this lets me clean it up and then save out a very high (1M+ polys) mesh for baking.

I then use 3DC smart decimation to create a very small mesh (all 4 statues are under 900 vertexes each!) and export into SketchUp. I'll bake the original mesh on in Substance later and you can see the result.

@rtd said:

I have a similar problem - easy to describe:
I'd like to move one corner of a planer surface.
I had assumed that I'd need 'Vertex Tools' or another plugin, but then I saw DaveR's reply.

I can't get vertices to display. SU behaves as though vertices didn't exist. This is consistent with the general rule that SU only knows about edges and faces.

What am I missing?

Here's something which may help....

A quick set of animation tests with SketchFX Es:

I then took the SU cannon into 3D Coat and added distress. There were three objects, one for each material (wood, bronze cannon, and metal). OBJs were exported and UVs added automatically in 3D Coat.

The model was exported as bake targets for Substance Painter and there materials applied, then exported and rendered in Unity.

Next the model was tweaked in SU to create a low poly version and baked and mapped again in Substance Designer. Here are the two high poly and low poly versions of the cannon side-by-side in Unity.

Then, the model was voxelized and tweaked in 3DC and made an entire solid for 3D printing. Many of the features had to be 'supersized' in order to meet the material thickness threshold requirements. Here's the under 1M poly finished 3D print model in 3D Coat.

Finally, colors needed to be added for 3D printing in Substance Painter. The same bake targets were added and then adjusted for the supersized details. Also, I only used diffuse maps (no normals, metallic, smoothness) as the color Sandstone material would not reflect the other qualities. The model was mapped, exported to MeshLab and converted x3d for final upload to Shapeways.

Here's what it should look like when I receive it.

Here's a video describing some of this process:

@nickchun said:

Fantastic! I will be taking a look in more detail when I get a chance, its interseting to see how you integrate all the different software.
Love the clay and sketchy renders also.

Thanks.

@pbacot said:

This is exciting! Beautiful, beautiful work1 The cannons alone, or the facade alone...are work to be proud of. Hope we get to see the final result!

Thank you.
The facade renders are BEFORE I'll be adding the actual textures for the game model. I expect they'll be much better when completed.

Early stuff:
I started off by using the Oob topology plugins to grab a site terrain to begin work with. I then used Gary's notes, drawings and legacy Alamo blueprints to begin to layout the site. One great thing about SU is each Group/Component has it's own local axis and it made it very easy to work in different axis planes for each of the buildings. This allowed me to keep the model true to compass, so I can then later identify accurate lighting and shadows.

Not sure if anyone checks out WIPs, but I've started a thread there on the making of the Alamo which goes into detail creating assets for the Alamo Reality AR/VR project including workflows and 3D printing tips.

https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=333%26amp;t=68263%26amp;p=624806

Back to the Alamo church. After base approval, the model is tweaked and further componentized, keeping mindful of creating solids which could easily be voxelized in 3D Coat for adding further distress.

The workflow for creating the correct textures includes a custom shader I built in Unity, the details can be found at: https://public.3.basecamp.com/p/oTZSntqtnpobGTrE4WmpRq6P

As the shader does a great job with the normal bakes, you can see the hard lines of the underlying low poly geometry belies it's simple shape on profile views. So, my next step was to go into and add some very low poly distress to corners and edges where they might be seen frequently in profile.

Currently, I'm working with my new SketchFX Ex extension to figure out a custom render theme and video workflow for these in progress pictures. Here are a few tests..

One of the cannons was the first prop I worked on. The goal is to create a photoreal version of it which when rendered in Unity looked like the real thing. I also needed to create a realistic and properly colored version of it for 3D Printing. Just building out the workflow for it took over a weeks time but the results worked great.

Here's the SU model which as you can see the wheels and the support beams were skewed, so I created on-axis component accurate versions of them, then copied them and adjusted in other components.