Damn!

....so I decided to get back to manually building paper scale models:

Lots of fun, except for the sticky glued fingers you get afterwards.

I hope you like.

Cheers,
kwistenbiebel

I love the first one, mostly because of the subtle lighting and soft shadows on that back wall.
Nice work.

By the way, what's the brand of that sofa, is it Cinna ?

Oops
Thanks for pointing this out Whaat.
I only recently started using Indigo again as you know so I am still searching my way.
When I find time (weekend?) I'll try your suggestion on the use of thin glass.
Also it could be that I didn't use the best optimised render settings (I used 'hybrid') so maybe another setting will improve the render time.

Cheers,
Kwistenbiebel

Thanks frederick,
I am sure progressive path tracing would be quicker...I just had to try out the 'new' option MLT(bipt)

E-mailing a 140 MB attachment ? I think that's going to be difficult.

I don't remember all the render times unfortunately...but I can give a clue.

Ranked from short to long render time for this scene:

1. Vray : about 45 minutes 'universal Vlado settings)
2. Fry : about 1 hour 'default' + 45 minutes 'aeronoise' for the difficult parts
3. Maxwell: about 2 hours
4. Kerkythea: about 3 hours (I used the MLT (bpt) setting but I think PPT would be quicker
5. Indigo: about 4 hours

note: some of the images should have rendered longer to go clean so this is not a good comparison on render speed.

Thanks Stinkie and sepo

This is the Sketchup screen.
I only set up 3 materials for each render engine : the glass, a bump map for the plaster and a 'plastic' material for the painted metals. I used the default 'thin glass' or 'ghost glass' settings for the single faced glass panels for all render engines except for Indigo where I used a 'glossy transparent' (Indigos thin glass can only be applied to double faced glass).

The model of the house is Evermotion (I got help to get it converted from Max to SU).
The vegetation is all 3D and imported as .3ds.

@unknownuser said:

Thanks!!
Interesting how close they are. Which of the renderers do you default to most often?

They are close because I tonemapped them afterwards to my liking.
It's difficult to say which render engine I use most. It depends on the scene that needs to be rendered. Often I make quick test renderings on low res using different engines and then pick the one that gives the most pleasing output to elaborate further.
I must admit that I don't use any of the 'unbiased' render engines (Fry, maxwell, indigo, KT unbiased) when I need to do an interior scene. It just takes way too long.

When I need results fast, Podium is my friend. I hope to include a Podium render later on (I had some trouble using Podium for this scene as it is a 140 MB file but I'll give it a second try).

All render engines could export the scene (140 Mb) without flaw except for the SU2KT exporter which made my Pc come to a stall so I exported the scene in 10 different pieces to Kerkythea (took me ages).
The fastest exporters were Vray,Fry and Indigo.
The Maxwell one worked well but it took more than 1/2 hour to get it exported.

I hope to make a Podium version soon and add it to the series.

4. KERKYTHEA

3. VRAY

5. MAXWELL

Hi people,

I ran this exterior scene through different render engines.
All had some color/light balancing in Pshop.

This is not meant as a comparison thread between render engines. Just an exercise on using them.

Feel free to comment...

Cheers,
Kwistenbiebel

1.FRY

2. INDIGO

I think Whaats upcoming plugin still adds more control though.
Also, Whaats 'subdivision' option could make the use of 'smooving' more interesting as we can subdivide in between smoove commands.
But indeed, will Sketchup be able to react fluently when polycount increases?

I would be willing to skip all my wishes for SU 7 and just keep 'higher polycount control' as the one and only must have wish for next release . Go Google

Wow Irsuser ,

This is really photographic ! amazing render.
Very curious how many weeks this render cooked...

Take your time.
Good wine needs time to ripe.
A good thing you want to make the plugin capable of running on higer poly models as well.
That will probably be a hard nut to crack. A ruby always is kind of on top of sketchup and not so much imbedded, so I guess overcoming the speed issue will not be easy to solve...

There is no harm in that. . I can understand how these forms can appeal to people and in a way it is well done (proportion wise).

Luckily, different architects have different views on architecture . It would be a shame if we all were designing the same thing This keeps our built world lively...

It's a crash between Frank Lloyd Wright, Botta ,some other post modernistic influences and rural history.
For me this kind of eclectic collage tends to lean towards formalism.
Combining those style elements in such a way ,so it would appeal to the 'romantesque' feel of the spectator is a bizarre way of making architecture.

It's kind of a tradition in the US to be eclectic and to mash different style elements together.
The last one that really could get away with that was Charles Moore imho.
At least his work was concept driven

good design?
Thank god people can differ in taste

The modeling itself is awesome though, so thumbs up Jason

Well I be damned!
Thanks for sharing this as I didn't know about this easter egg...
Amazing what you can do with it.