ha 
, the first shot! I remember I did some photos like this to a roman villa under an apple tree field, standing on the top of a ladder of a fireman truck. 
Just one question: what are the lattices (grids) at the windows? I've never seen this before, or read about it. So I'm curious.
I'm looking forward seeing it textured.
It's impressive how clean the images are! I mean the whole scene organization and the final output. 
What rendering program did you use?
I know you are great with Vue: I'd be happy to be wrong, but these doesn't look Vue renderings.
If anyone is interested, the castle shell is now on the 3d Warehouse: waiting to be validated by the Google Earth team.
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=f0998f0a25d94d9cd8d6813d77f7b830&prevstart=0
since the surrounding forest hides part of the walls, I could not make all textures; then I decided to assign only flat colours to the whole structure.
thank you all for your warm appreciation sepo, solo, durant, olishea, pilou, richard, tomislavm, gaieus, frederik, prisoner, chango70! I didn't expect that
@chango70: the music clip credits are in the end titles - I downloaded it from Jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/)and it is released under creative commons.
@richard said:
Darn shame when you watch this, makes you realise how cool it would be to have SU's section plane auto fill closed volumes and also only consider shadow cast from the full model, uneffected by the section.
@gaieus said:
And Richard is right; would be really cool not to see the "hollows". AFAIK TIG is working on some "super 'SectionCutFace' plugin" that could do this. Oh my, if that came to reality!
me too!
actually I consider this just a test video, since that section limit.
I also tried to do it with Vue d'Esprit: it would be cool to keep the quality of the title rendering while animating down the section plane. I tried it by subtracting a big parallelepiped from the castle. Sadly, it doesn't work. Vue is not able to recognize the difference between empty and full spaces in the imported model: it's a surface that contains a really complex topological space. The result was something messed up like after a teletransport malfunction.
I had a good time making the some subtraction inside sketchup with Booltools by Dale - this time the subtraction worked quite well: it's incredible how good that plugin works.
Some screenshots and an explanation in italian can be found in my blog - as soon as I can, I'll translate the concept of Section Sphere to SCF too
for a preview just click on the link under my signature: entry 033
the process is quite simple
animate the section cut effects - here a short explanation: http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=94998
export your animation to any format you like. in this case i exported it as compressed xvid, 720x576 px @ 25fps (standard pal europe)
combine sound, paper texture overlay and transition effects with your favourite video editor. i use ulead media studio pro
upload the final cut to youtube and let it shrink down the quality of your clip 
I've noticed if I apply Chris Fullmer's the scale&rotate multiple ruby to a set of 2d-face-me components, they'll act weird when I orbit the scene.
It looks like as their origin points were displaced randomly.
A park full of Tom's trees has become an enchantend dancing forest: that's black magic 
I've noticed that sketchup uses both cores of my processor when i change view (pan, zoom & rotate).
I'm running it on windows xp 32 bit sp3.
Does it explain all (or partially) that gain of speed, or was it the some before the 7.1 release?
/matteo
well, if it's just a matter of color, post-processing is the right way: there are lots and lots of tutorials on the web and the learning curve is not too steep. Once you learned, you can edit your image in real time, and that's good. No more waiting for the rendering engine to complete it's task.
Besides all hue and gamma adjustments that you can do, I've found very useful the Optikverve plugin: it works with photoshop and the gimp, even if in gimp the preview doesn't work well.
It's free and you can download it here: http://www.optikvervelabs.com/
Uh! they updated it... I just discovered it searching the url.
This application helps you to adjust the overall aspect of a picture, or of just a selected part. It also helps to enhance dark areas.
The b&w output is also worth a try: many times a b&w image is better than a colored one.
I hope it can help you.
/matteo
That's why clay rendering is so popular!
Yep, it's like Gaieus says, a trial and error experiment.
My error is that I tend to achieve the perfection inside the rendering program, while skilled people uses a lot of postproduction: it's quicker.
In other words, don't waste time in fine-tuning your materials inside the rendering program and correct your final image with a good editor like Photoshop.
When you find the correct light, most of the work is done.
/matteo
what is the execution time?
just following the terrible pun...
brilliant work
if I understood well what you did, apart from being a perfect tool to trace images and imported cad files, this is the beginning of the end for many 2d cad applications
thank you, I'll try it as soon as I can.
/matteo
hi Matt, and thank you for this plugin.
That's a very smart idea. 
If you don't mind, I've converted the values so that it works with metric units: my experience with ruby programming is zero, I've just converetd inches into centimeters, after a bit of tweaking.
What I understand is that sketchup's internal engine works in inches, even if the length is displayed in meters or centimeters.
Please correct me if I made some mistakes. 
/matteo
Select Loop is a plugin made by Thomas Thomassen. Now it's part of the Selection Toys, a combo of selection options that can be downloaded here:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=14975&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=select+toys
[flash=425,344:2bbulp22]http://www.youtube.com/v/rBYvMQ0Rwf8&hl=it&fs=1[/flash:2bbulp22]
The video illustrates one situation where this script was useful.
/matteo
benvenuto Alberto!
concordo in pieno, purtroppo un forum decente in italiano non c'è. Della 7 in italiano neanche l'ombra; e dire che alla fine si tratta di aggiornare un paio di traduzioni dei comandi.
buon divertimento con sketchup1
/matteo
ciao luca,
scusa il ritardo nel risponderti, ma questa sezione del forum è praticamente morta - se non hai già risolto, potresti allegare almeno un paio di screenshot per capire meglio il tuo problema?
/matteo
@mitcorb said:
Do they pick up their scales and measure images on the screen?
lol
I've used Archicad, and it's default background is white.
I suppose that this is just a question of comfort and habit: Photoshop interface is ugly, but it has become the standard.
What they say is that a black background is more relaxing and, after 8 hours spent facing a monitor, you won't have such an headache and sick eyes.
One good feature that I discovered is that, if you print what you have on your screen (with a black background style), you'll get a negative print: a white sheet with black lines. But if you do a rendering, it will be saved as you see it on your screen.
That's smart! Thanks again to the developers of SU.
I'm currently teaching sketchup to some employees of an engineering studio: they don't like at all to draw on a white background; I had to make a template with the black background, like Autocad.
Do you find disturbing the white background?
I personally love the warm light yellow (moustard?) of the default style.
And you?
/matteo
David, these images are just superb
thank you for sharing them.
