great brick texture, it receives the light really well

i agree with david's comment - the cantilever at the top of the entry is a strange brick condition

the second image looks awesome - like some 70's building was retrofit with a new screen on the outside

great start - here's my very basic contribution: setting up real world scaling and importing at the right scale from SU

1. Vue 7 offers good features for real world scaling, file>options>units & coordinates set your unit of measure in "display unit" category (i set to feet) and pick z axis up in "world coordinate system" to match SU. Make sure to check "apply new settings to current scene" if you are doing this the first time

2. In SU file>export>3d model, I pick .obj export type, set units to "feet" and check "export texture maps" and "swap YZ coordinates" this will create an obj file and a file folder with all of your texture maps for import

3. In Vue file>import object and pick your obj file. In the options box that appears, check "center object" and "resize object" , pick "manual resizing" and set object scaling ratio to 10.00. This seems like a strange number but is the exact factor all of my models come in by, possibly because vue is still in a base 10 system even though you switched units to imperial.

4. In Vue, some of your materials will display green, I am not sure why this occurs with OBJ export - however this is just a flaw in the preview display, and will be correct in the final render. If you did a good job naming your SU materials the next step will be easy - right click in the material preview window in the upper right hand corner. You will see a list of all of your materials that came in with your import. Select a material and select "edit material" to add bump/displacement/reflection maps. As a side note, some materials that use a .png will come in with some strange settings in the opacity, so you will have to change these manually on import.

5. Vue away!

any corrections/comments welcome

@chris

in premiere if you click on a clip in the timeline, you will get a "video effects" panel above - you can set the scale to 50 so that premiere will take care of the downsizing for you, which I find a lot faster than the photoshop batch action. You might also explore using the "anti-flicker" setting in the same place that puts a slight blur on the animation to keep very small lines from blinking on and off in the final export!

ah - thanks for posting the model. I gave it a shot with the big box trick and the lighting was much more even - good fix!

i still think there is something strange going on in the podium daylight renders (both yours and mine) - shouldn't all of the room boxes be equally lit? some of the ones in the center of yours are obviously darker which doesn't make much sense unless the light source is very close to the model.

edit: i notice the same thing happening in solo's post as well - check out the bottom box

here's a quick hack at the method posted by brodie

one flaw is that there is not realistic lighting in the depth of the window the way I showed it, perhaps if you keep the window lip in the daylight layer this would be more convincing

how are you avoiding dark corners in the back of the interiors with this? see attached test model

dave - don't forget to take into consideration the width of the 'scene' tabs at the top when you start setting up your animation

thanks everyone for workaround tips - very helpful for my rendering attempts!

@jperdman said:

The weakness of the templates (that I wish they'd fix) is that the tool palettes are not part of the templates. The tools that show up when I start from the disk image version of SU7 are the basic default set regardless of the tools that were in use when the template was made. We have to customize the tool palettes each day of class. The USB drive version gets around this problem.

as far as I know, the tool palette display and location information is stored in the registry - with your usb trick, if you move to a different computer, will all the palettes actually appear as you previously had them?

as usual you are right on. Kind of ruins my SU>vue workflow though =P

is there any trick to "sealing" textures at the corners so that the displacement map will not move two faces apart - see attached image, I made it extreme to illustrate the point. This is SU to vue by the way. The problem does not seem to occur to objects that were created originally in vue such as the cube in the lower right, just imported models. Thanks!

thats a ridiculous amount of detail! are you using blueprints? good work!

here's a very easy way to do this:

1. draw a stray line anywhere
2. select your component and the line at the same time
3. use "flip along" to mirror on world axis
4. delete stray

is this what you are asking

those are great - definitely the most convincing, especially where you got the dark strokes at the edges of color changes!

Dale- that works great! Just to clarify: the process is click on autocad imported curve, select entity info, and fix the segments value in the palette that opens up

i am interested in this as well.. it seems like sketchup will automatically divide any circle into 24 segments and any arc into 12 segments regardless of size/length. see attached

those are great natural looking renders! good work!

cool thanks

i'd like to hear a little more about the post pro on that one mike, it came out with a great dusty air effect