Hi Cyberdactyl, no, unfortunately iRender doesn't do turbidity (yet?). Their image editor offers haze as a post-render processing option, but that didn't do much for this model. And the texture, well, it's a lame attempt at dirtmapping done in Photoshop... I would need procedurals to do it inside the render application, another option iRender doesn't have. I am so hoping some day the Vray people will finally fix their awful latest release, which is unable to render a model this size, and which has been sitting around uselessly on my PC ever since I, misguidedly, bought it...

I've been experimenting a bit with field of view, and played around in Photoshop with the result. I need to do something about the glass material, it doesn't look very good...

For those of you who are intererested, here are a few examples of the reference material I used. Vitruvius Britannicus is an excellent source, offering complete plans and elevations as well as, in this case, a famous and spectacular birds eye view. Still, modeling the thing soon made it clear that the drawings are not consistent among each other, so at times I had to improvise. There are no lateral views or views of inside courtyards in VB, so for those I relied on a visit, on photographs and even on scenes from the Brideshead Revisited TV-series (excellent!) and movie (awful!).

Jon, I envy you! I have traveled quite extensively but still consider Howard and its environs to be the most beautiful place I've ever been...

Hm, no, unfortunately. Attempts to export this to Kerkythea only make SU crash. That's why I opt for renderers that work inside SU.

You are undoubtedly right though that a little more work on thorough use of components would reduce the file size... I tend to be a bit lax in that way, bad, bad habit... Not that I would expect such a 'cleanup' to solve the export problem, I'm afraid my system simply isn't up to the task.

Tempting thought Pilou... only, where will I put it...?

Adam, I need to get into the iRender material editor more; I barely scratched the surface. But bitmap textures are basically useless, except for detail views; on the large scale patterning will occur. As for the glass, suggestions are welcme! I'm not satisfied with the metal ornaments either.

As far as I've been able to see iRender unfortunately doesn't do AO. I'm still hoping ASGVIS will finally come up with a decent patch for their new, incredibly buggy Vray, which has been sitting on my PC unused for over a month now because it crashes every time I try to render this model. I would be very curious to see what VRAY makes of this!

...iRender turned out another one overnight.

Here's another render. I love this feature of iRender, it actually does true orthogonal renders.

Thanks all! Jopsa, I'd love to texture it, but I would need a renderer that does procedurals (actually I have one, Vray, but it is unable to render models this large ). I think I'll be experimenting in Photoshop instead. Best of all would be to export this to Vue, as someone else suggested, but on my system that is definitely out of the question... (and like SU, Vue is very good at handling its own native format, but not so good at handling imported geometry).

As for stats:
3,446,304 edges
1,527,138 faces
6,682 component instances
3,832 groups

I am on a P4, 2,13 Ghz dual core Vista PC, with 4 GB of RAM and a 'Loser Edition' nVidia card that I will be replacing one of these days... (it messes up shadows completely). The model was finished in SU 7, and SU can handle it without any problem at all; only, when orbiting, components and groups go into box mode. I had several crashes, however, when trying to export large bitmaps.

PS, Jopsa: I found your Pantheon greatly inspiring, it seems to me that operates at an even higher level of detail!

Oh, and did I say thank you yet to Fredo for his brilliant plugins, without which this would have taken another year at least?

Remus, the statues are 3d, but I must adnmit I didn't model them myself. I found them on the internet and only simplified them a bit for use in this model. The bas reliefs on the facade are textures.

Yeah, Charly, I prefer historical buildings too for modeling. But it is indeed rare to find such good reference material as in Vitruvius Brittanicus. It was the Dover reissue of that book which got me going on this project. Actually, VB will allow you to model almost any 18th century English country house; but I think I'll lay off for a while and do something completely different...

I did these renders in the trial version of iRender, which runs out in 6 days, so I'm now considering buying it. It does have good RPC plant options that I'd love to experiment with!

...and with regard to all those hours, you are right, I enjoyed most of them hugely!

Well, it took over a year and I don't even want to think about the number of hours I spent on it, but it's done.

Castle Howard (situated some 12 miles north of the city of York, UK) was designed in 1699 by John Vanbrugh (who was at that time not an architect but a playwright!) for the 3d Earl of Carlisle. Building progressed steadily for a while, until the earl shifted his attention to laying out the gardens and then ran into money trouble. The proposed west wing and forecourt were never finished according to Vanbrugh's design. When a successor finally came round to finishing the building some 80 years later, Vanbrugh's baroque had gone out of fashion and a family member who fancied himself an architect came up with a bland design in the then fashionable palladian style, that took no account whatsoever of the original plans, giving the building the strange, lopsided look we know today. The current owners of the house are so dismayed by this that they won't even allow pictures of this wing to appear in the guidebook.

It's been a while since I first thought that SU would be an ideal means of creating a 3d vision of Vanbrughs original plan. So last year I took the plunge. I worked from drawings in Vitruvius Britannicus (published in three volumes from 1715-1725 and recently reissued by Dover), from photographic reference material (some of it collected during a visit to the house last May), and when neither was conclusive or where drawings were at odds with each other I used my imagination, hopefully in the spirit of Vanbrugh.

So here it is. Renders were done in iRender NXT and are as yet basic. Texturing is a problem, bitmaps simply won't do in a model this size, you get patterning, it looks ugly. But at least iRender is able to handle this 81MB beast, which is more than can be said of Vray... exporting 2D images from SU itself is rather more of a problem too...

..why didn't I see this before? Sigh... Just bought the new Vray, which is giving me endless trouble. Because I can t(yet?) render with that, I downloaded the iRender demo. It's excellent! Beautiful results, absolutely on a par with Vray; far more intuitive interface; and some nice environment options too. It renders a big model that makes Vray crash without a glitch, and pretty fast at that. So much for impulse buying. I'm seriously considering getting this anyway. Congratulation to you and your team Al!

I bought the new VRAY as soon as it was out, after having been very pleased with the results of the old version, of which I ran a demo. The new version has a more extensive interface and offers quite a lot of options not available previously. It is generally more complex and less straightforward than the previous version, and the UI looks rather random, if not messy.

Unfortunately, there is no manual as yet, and otherwise too I get the feeling this new version was put on the market too hastily. In my case I get crashes whenever I try to render models of any serious size (models that rendered fine on old vray). There are quite a lot of reports of this and similar bugs on the ASGVIS forums. And even though people there are helpful, I still think you cannot sell a product for nearly $800 (an exorbitant price in any case for a plugin to a program that is basically free!) when it isn't really out of beta yet. At the moment, I would prefer to go back on my purchase and install an older version of Vray.

Thanks Thomthom. I've meanwhile taken this problem to the asgvis forums, where I find I'm not the only one having it. It doesn't happen with every model, but it does with any big one. New vray doesn't seem able to handle these, while old vray could. No solution so far, and I can't help but feel deeply annoyed that such expensive software has been put on the marked with such serious issues remaining...

That's a quick response jchau, thanks!

But yes, I fully uninstalled the previous version. Meanwhile, after the first panic has abated a bit, I have found that the problem has to do with the size and complexity of the model I'm trying to render. Simple scenes render perfectly without a glitch. But the model I want to render is a 40 MB monster (and still growing), so there seems to be a memory issue there. Still, that very same model rendered without a problem in the older version of VRAY.

This afternoon I purchased and installed the new VRAY after having used the demo of the old version to great satisfaction, and without any problems. I have attempted to make several renders, using simple default settings. However, each and every time SU shuts down completely a few minutes after the start of the render process, and I get a bugsplat message.

Have I just wasted $800...!!??

I noticed that after installing the new VRAY a number of pop-ups flash by very quickly when SU starts (way too fast to read them, you can just see the outline of the window before it disappears again).

Are there known issues with this new edition of VRAY, or am I just having bas luck? I do hope there is a way to solve this!

(P4, dual core, 2.133 Ghz, 4 GB ram, Nvidia Geforce LE videocard)

After having used a demo of 'old' VRAY with good results I decided to take the plunge and buy the new VRAY for SU that's just out. I wish I hadn't. The appliction installed correctly and all the buttons are functional, however, shortly after hitting the render button SU just shuts down and I get a bugsplat message.

I did notice that after installing VRAY, the SU startup has become considerably slower. Also, a number of pop-ups flash by, but so fast that you can just see the outline of the pop-up window, nothing more.

All this is pretty frustrating, especialy given VRAYs ambitious price tag... Are others experiencing similar issues?

FYI, I'm on a Pentium 4 Intel dual core 2,133 Ghz with 4 GB of RAM and a nVidea GeForce videocard

Here's a little wish I've had as long as I've been using SU: separate options for hiding geometry and for hiding softened edges. I've never understood why there's only one hiding option for both together, they are very different things. If I'm working in a model with lots of curved surfaces, I often need to hide a number of groups and components, while at the same time I want to see the softened edges. But if 'Show hidden geometry' is on, my hidden groups are shown as well. So my only option until now is to put them on another layer, and I hate working with layers in SU - the whole concept is alien to the software and very unintuitive, and usually (with me at least) causes no end of confusion... So please give me a 'Show softened edges' button.

While I use (and love) Modo, and occasionally work in 3ds Max, for me nothing beats Sketchup when it comes to architecture. None of the other apps gives me the same feeling of freedom and simplicity.

I do concur though that Sketchup has not grown the way it might have if Google hadn't taken over. The overaccentuation of SU as a Google Earth tool has prompted a barrage of simplistic, quick-and-easy, uninteresting models, and tends to obscure SU's possibilities for making large, very detailed and very precise models (I also hate that Google bar at the bottom of the SU 7 interface, what a waste of screenspace!). Many things I see in the user gallery here today certainly are no match for what there used to be in the @Last gallery, in days that the program didn't even have a follow-me tool...

Obviously, some of the brilliant plugins by the people mentioned (thanks guys!) deserve to become an integral part of SU 8.