[flash=800,600:mb7cdwsb]http://www.youtube.com//v/jqc2FhUcEVA[/flash:mb7cdwsb]

Here's a workaround I came up with using Protrude, From Contours, Drape CPoints, Triangulate Cpoints and Artisan. Sounds like a lot, but goes pretty quick and gives you good control of size and placement. Using protrude without offset will give you smoother initial results than shown and using it with taper will give even more noise than show. Not as good as a one click plugin, but does the job. (I add a water plane at the end of the video, but obviously it's not a necessary step for just making hills and such)
[flash=800,600:2ii08af9]http://www.youtube.com/v/Dzy3wC96Ejw[/flash:2ii08af9]

@patrickbateman said:

I would like to avoid having to bring it into photoshop since a lot of what I am doing is conceptual and I often need to make changes, render a few stills, and show a client in a short time period while they're in a meeting. So if I'm asked to show something slightly different in the model I can just make the changes and re-render instead of having to re-render then bring it into photoshop. It saves a lot of time then I can render a bunch of different scenes without having to modify each one.

Actually I feel the opposite. I use photoshop to save time, not add time to my workflow. You can often spend an hour trying to fuss with things like adding a slight grass border or tweaking a problem area. I can drop a solid color on a grass plane in sketchup and in less than 3 minutes have it opened in photoshop, the grass swapped out, the edges cloned stamped and saved again. Time spent in photoshop is often at the sake of smaller render times as well. 3D grass will send render times through the roof, so sometimes you save time with photoshop that way and often get better results. I understand your logic of wanted to keep the model pure so you can easily spit out a bunch of conceptual views. Personally I try and keep the conceptuals I present as loose as possible. I tend to save the push toward photorealism until we are narrowed in to the final changes and at that point, every image gets a little photoshop work. All the client sees are the images and have no real clue how they were derived. It's our job to provide a client with an emotional connection to the space and present design intention. We are persuading a client to spend money and feel confident in their choices and investments. Getting them there is all that matters....by any means necessary.

Anyway, here are quite a few High Res grass textures of mine, that may be close to what you are looking to achieve. Normal maps included - http://www.mediafire.com/?fefi5mw11qynvpp

Patrick, I believe the $700 is for the first year and then is $100 a year after that. The cost is for the plugin which helps cleanup the Dynascape (CAD) files for sketchup, all of the textures, prebuilt models and the 2D and 3D plants. I assume they are also adding to the library which is where the subscription comes in. All in all, it's not that outrageous.

Also, as you can tell from this thread (/advertisement), Dynascape hooked up with Daniel Tal and probably Shaderlight to offer a complete solution for landscape designers to break into the world of 3D modeling, training and rendering. For those architects and designer who are trying to get up to speed on 3D and start offering it to their clients, this is great deal and a good strategy by Dynascape.

I haven't truly evaluated it to make a genuinely informed decision, but from the renders posted the collection has a nice overall "illustrative" look. Again, not as photoreal as I like, but for most it's probably just right.

Comparing it to Cadplants it's not apples to apples. Cadplants is great in sheer volume, but also are poorly made and frustrating to work with out of the box. They are simply the collection of plants that are sold with IdeaSpectrum Landscape Architect for $250, but mass converted to .skp. A lot have the wrong scale, they are all facing the reverse direction, they don't face the camera and are not cataloged easily. $400 is a good deal, but you get what you pay for.

There is a distinct difference between foreground grass, perspective grass and aerial grass. Each one requires a different strategy.

For foreground grass, either use Alan's method or you could isolate foreground geometry and use the Make Fur plugin - http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=28092

Perspective grass - I'm sorry, but a flat texture just never looks good in a perspective view without being post processed. If you want to find images however, a quick google search for the words "grass texture" yeilded all of these - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=grass+texture&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&biw=1374&bih=649&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi

Aerial grass usually suffers from noticeable tiling. For this it's better to take the texture into photoshop and copy it to a blank canvas that is 4 times larger than the image and then manually clone stamp the middle area to increase the tiling to a less noticeable size.

All in all, I think you need to work on finding a workflow of your own and evolving it over time, which is how most of us have refined our methods. There is no real magic here, but rather just understanding sketchup thoroughly and working within the confines of it's logic. (which all plugins adhere to)

It sounds as though you are a little over committed with your new job position and in turn are scrambling to learn everything in a matter of days instead of the years it took most of us to develop our toolsets and modeling strategies. There is no shortage of help here, but I'm just suggesting you take it in smaller steps and work through the precise aspects of each problem as you encounter it. Amassing a ton of information all at once can lead to more headaches and confusion. Just a suggestion and not at all a knock on your general ambition.

It sounds as if your biggest issues are -

1. Terrain Management
2. Plant placement and lack of plant material as well as hedges and groundcovers and grass.
3. Textures
4. Building Modeling

Terrain Management - What type of terrain data are you dealing with? (contour lines, grade shots, cloud data, survey TIN, etc.) How accurate are you trying to get? What are your main issues with the terrain you are creating? Sounds like you are trying to retopo the "From Contours" terrain to add more detail. You can use the Artisan plugin to subdivide particular areas. Didier's Terrain Resurfacer plugin works okay as well. I like using TIG's Drape Cpoints and Triangulate Cpoints plugins to retopo my terrains. Whatever is easier. You might also check out Instant Site Grader from Chuck Vali. There has been a lot of discussion on terrains here, so a quick search will probably yield a plethora of answers as will very specific question with illustrated examples of your problems.

Plants - Again, do a search, there are a lot of solutions on here. SCF member Oli made some nice hedges and shared them. Pixero made some nice Hornbeam hedges and shared them. I shared a bunch of landscape 2D plants. Solo and Tomsdesk have plant collections for sale on Solo's website. http://www.Solosplace.com. The 3D warehouse has a ton of plants. There are several other nice commercial collections out there. (Realworld Imagery, Dosch, etc) It all depends on our specific needs. As far as grass, the best is 3D grass, but not really possible in sketchup. (I use 3ds Max with 3D proxies and a free scatter plugin) 2nd best is compositing grass in photoshop. Lastly is textured flat grass. Check around, there are several threads on grass. Not sure why you are so against photoshop and post process, but to get where you want to be, you'll need it. For groundcover, you could also try the Sketchup Ivy plugin and swap the ivy leaf with a groundcover leaf.

Textures - They are all over. Just gotta search. Your best resource will be yourself and learning how to make seamless textures. There is a thread somewhere in the resources section with about 50 links to different texture resources.

Building Modeling - There are several roof building plugins (check TIG & Chuck Vali) and various window (Windowizer 4) and door plugins that will speed up house building. Also check out 1001bits Pro for good tools that aid in building construction. It depends on how accurate you are trying to get. I use mostly native sketchup tools for building construction while utilizing components as much as possible. It's still a very time consuming process. Your best bet would be to set up your camera scenes as soon as you block out your structures and then only add details to those areas that will be in the render view. Again, there is no magic solution, just time and practice.

Some plugins to look into. (For starters)

Soap Skin & Bubble - Great for adding a mounded contour to bed shapes. http://www.tensile-structures.de/sb_software.html

UV Projection - For easily fixing grass and mulch textures on surfaces made using "From Contours" - http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=34552

Selection Toys - All useful features. The select Quad face loops is great for selection of all sides on a wall or pillar cap. http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=14975

Joint Push Pull - Useful in conjunction with select quad face loops to quickly add overhand to caps and step treads. http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=6708

I also have worked out a great method for using the CadPlants library more effectively. It involves renaming the whole library to the common and botanical names instead of being numbered. I used a program called Advanced Renamer to do a batch renaming, utilizing the Excel file that comes with the plants to create a "list" and then using that list as the guidlines for batch renaming. I then use Project Sketch from RenderPlus to search and place the plant components. There is also a great little script that I asked to be developed which will take the CadPlants and have the face the camera all at once. It requires they all be on their own layer. - http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=22084 If you need help with the renaming, let me know.

Another helpful thing would be a method I worked out for doing accurate soldier courses and pool coping. It involves multiple scripts. As soon as I have time, I'll put together a tutorial on this.

Regarding plants, you are on the right track. Making your own to supplement what you have is the best method for architects who are looking for accurate representation. I think you get a better result from 2D plants, unless you are animating, then 3D is the way to go. If you are only rendering still images, then I would use photoshop to composite in things like ground cover and grass. Birds eye view is tough with 2D plants. I typically do a plan view with plant symbols and then call out to a plant image or name. You could check out Sketch3D from Dynascape or FormFonts as well.

Hope that helps.

As I said, Vray is most likely faster because of it's ability to fine tune the interpolation of sampling and intelligently determine where more samples are needed and where the image can get away with less. A lot of biased solutions simply break the rendered image up into quadrants of pixels and sample a predetermined number of pixels from each quadrant and then interpolate the rest. (Brute Force methods)

Think about it like someone doing a soil study on a particular lot. A surveyor will not come in with an excavator and remove all the soil to study it, rather he will take the lot in question and divide it into quadrants from which he will take samples from. He will take a vile of soil from each quadrant and send it to the lab. In the lab they will identify what minerals, organisms or contaminates are in each vile and then based on the quadrant overview, they can interpolate what the overall soil content of the lot is. If the technician determines that the results are too vague, then he will send the surveyor back out and have him subdivide the quadrants into smaller quadrants and take more samples to get a more accurate reading. This will, however, take much longer for the surveyor to collect the samples and longer for the lab to process them.

Biased render engines do a similar process, except it is working with pixels instead of soil. Based on the readings (material properties, sun ray direction, camera settings, etc) assigned to each pixel, it can determine the average result between multiple readings.. This is the interpolation that takes place. The more samples taken from each quadrant, the less guessing that takes place and the more accurate the overall image will become. But, as in the example above, more sampling takes more time.

The strength of Vray is that it doesn't just quadrify and take uniform samples from a flat image, but it will also take into consideration a lot of other factors. It will save samples for areas that are more important to the final composition (foreground items, refractory materials, dark shadows, etc) and use less samples where more interpolation would be less noticeable. This is possible due to the unique means by which Vray calculates and stores the Irradiance Map, by which it creates what is essentially a point cloud of radiance calculation and then uses that information to make more intelligent overall sampling decisions.

Vray also does a really good job at loading and unloading geometry on the fly dynamically, which helps to use the memory where needed most and then unloading it.

Once you can wrap your head around what the Vray settings do, it is not as complicated as it first appears. In fact there are really less than ten settings that you every really need to mess with and out of those, less than five that you will adjust often. By spending an hour or two with a simple scene full of primitive objects, you can quite easily see what does what. Any and all questions can also be answered at http://www.spot3D.com

I'm not sure how exactly Shaderlight works under the hood, but if it appears slower, it may just be a matter of it performing less approximation algorithms and more of a brute force attack. It doesn't mean it is better or worse, just different. Sometimes a program that takes a more brute force approach may take longer on the front end, but they also may get it right on the first try, whereas Vray may take a couple test renders to determine where the sampling tweaks need to be made. Also Vray set to DMC as it's primary will yield different render times and may come in slower but more accurate than Shaderlight on the same scene. It's all relative.

As far as unbiased solutions, there is a different framework, by which each pixels is analyzed in a progressive fashion and continuously refined based on the parameters assigned to that pixel. There is no sampling, interpolation or approximation in the same manner as a biased engine. It is a constant tracing of pixels until the user is satisfied. It is still "rendering" and as such there is still consistent query and decision process being made by the engine, but there is no "averaging between pixels" taking place in the direct manner by which a biased engine does it.

At least this is how I've come to understand it all.

Thanks Mike. Great find. The Trees and Shrubs are very nice and a good price - http://www.2dplan.com/treesandshrubs.html

Perfection! Great job. I would live to see it with a dusk .hdri or night exterior. The lighting looks great.

Both do support transparency.

The realtime preview in shaderlight is really nice.

Twilight give you both biased and unbiased solutions with a great MLT engine.

I too use a lot of 2D faceme cutouts and I don't think you can go wrong with either. Twilight will give you a nice material collection and templates to easily make materials. Shaderlight is also a good option and scores highly with it's ease of use and believable lighting. I would suggest trying both and seeing which one fits better with your desired results.

Asking which is better however is like asking whether a Fender or Martin will make you a better guitar player.

There is a reason Vray is the number one biased render engine on the market, especially for visualization companies. That is because of it's complicated open framework. The biased market is all about sampling and who can interpolate the fastest with the most accurate results. The developers of Vray decided to give overwhelming control of the engines tunings to the user and allow each aspect of the processed to be tuned and manipulated. So the main difference between the Vray engine and any other biased solution is that it allows the knowledgeable user to also be more adaptive to each scene they are rendering and find the good balance between speed and quality.

Programs like Shaderlight are a little more "closed hood" when it comes to the inner framework. It doesn't make them better or worse necessarily, just better suited for someone who isn't concerned with knowing how it works under the hood and would prefer a one click solution. The argument on which is faster is again not valid as it would vary from scene to scene. For example a scene with a lot of glossy reflections may need an increase in overall sampling from a closed hood engine to get rid of the noise, whereas Vray can be tuned to specifically remedy this area, without compromising the speed in areas where extra sampling is not needed.

We've had a lot of "this vs. that" render threads and it always comes down to the user + quality of modeling skills and scene building abilities. So just find what's comfortable and stick with it until it no longer fits and then look for something else. In the beginning you need easy with good results so you can focus on the important things (modeling, scene development, etc) but once you reach a certain level, you may want more control over your render settings. No need to over think and over compare....just find what resonates with you and leave the rest.

[flash=480,385:2ht0oy4o]http://www.youtube.com/v/Q1-yWIJi-gg&feature=related[/flash:2ht0oy4o]

I think he meant "and that's all". Meaning once you choose a folder it remembers the location.

Nice Mike. I posted this a while back as well - http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=37225&p=328320&hilit=dynascape#p328320

I own the CAD software Dynascape and the Color Module, but haven't sprung for the Sketch 3D subscription yet. I felt the collection wasn't quite "photoreal" enough for closeup shots, although the 3D library is quite extensive and has all the "key" elements a landscape designer would need.

I think he means to be able to have a multiple selection of groups or components and by scaling one of them, the others scale also....relative to the bounding box of parent. In other programs you can set the coordinate type to "parent" and achieve this. There are a few plugins that do this, but none do it dynamically.

Previously I was hand tracing the perimeter within a group. I need to do this on every project as a means to combine the home and newly designed structural elements with the imported geolocation terrain. An automated process would be a huge time saver.

The current method involves (shown in the video I posted) -

Gleaning the Perimeter Outline via -
1 Selecting and grouping the model
2. Moving the model upward on the Z
3. Creating a WorkPlane on the ground http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=31204
4. Processing Silhouette to Plane - http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=31204
5 Deleting the work Plane
6. Exploding the Silhouette to Plane Group
7. Running EEbyVtoObject - http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=37515
8. Deleting all but the top edges

Merging it into the Terrain
9. Moving to the Google Earth Terrain
10. Cut/copy the Perimeter Trace
11. Opening the GE terrain group
12. Pasting in Place the Perimeter Trace
13. Selecting the Grouped perimeter and the terrain together
14 Running Instant Site Grader Pro - http://www.valiarchitects.com/sketchup_scripts

(Perimeter Trace can have NO truly vertical edges, or the Site Grader plugin won't work)

If at least the first 8 steps could be cut down by combining some snippets of existing code, that would be awesome. If it's a hassle....I'm more than grateful for the tools you've already created that make this possible in the first place! .....and it's still a lot faster than tracing it by hand!

Also, I think Instant Site Grader is great, but I don't like the linear fashion in which it grades the terrain into the perimeter trace. It seems it takes the footprint and offsets it by the user input, does some intersecting and deleting and then performs a "from contours" type operation to skin it back together. Perhaps using the perimeter trace to do the first part manually and then using Extrude Edges by Rails, would grade the terrain in a way it can still be sculpted. (just thinking out loud) Perhaps Bezier Patch will also be available soon.

Sure Jorge, it's here - http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=34552

Thanks for the help everyone. I tried both plugins posted, but neither did the trick. KYYU's was close, but it didn't work with groups which had nested groups within it.

TIG's method and tools worked perfectly and while it would be nice to have a single click procedure, the Silhouette to Plane combined with Extrude Edges by Vector to Object is a solid workflow for gleaning perimeter edges.

Here's a video of the process. I show it with an un-nested group and a nested set of groups. I also had issues if the Workplane overlapped the Silhouette before Extruding the Edges. Other than that, it accomplished what I needed. Thanks again.

[flash=800,600:3v7yphiu]http://www.youtube.com/v/kp0sB_sjSEk[/flash:3v7yphiu]

Perimeter Trace Test.skp

Matt, would it be possible to tie this into the Scene Tabs to change page numbers and label each view according to the named scene tabs? (i.e. Front Elevation, Rear Perspective, etc.)