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I occasionally use sketchyphysics too. I added the suggested tags to my SP models in 3D warehouse.
But I disable it as soon as I am done physics modeling, because it negatively interacts a with a bunch of plugins including getting terrain from google earth. I disable vray for some other negative interactions too.
For this, Tgi3D's latest released terrain tools can be useful. See topic http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=41062&p=363876&hilit=tgi3d#p363876. Training version and/or 30 day trial is free.
You need to follow mac1's advice too. Make a component from the repetitive blocks of the railing. First draw the railing on flat ground. ( I used Chris Fulmer's component stringer on the small block with the projection of the railing path to the ground plane. The path is also resampled at regular intervals matching component width). Then I drew a surface using channel extrude (you could use follow and keep as well I suppose) and I set that surface as the mapping target. Finally I used map to terrain on the railing using affine mode. The nice thing here is that the component hierarchy is preserved, i.e you can further edit the block component and it will be reflected to the whole of the design (check the attached skp file).
I sometimes do the effects seen in the picture. Wetting, bump mapping, irregular illumination using gimp (after making unique texture). I am sure PS would be fine too. This texture is SU standard Tile_Travertine_2inch. Making these effects tileable is another matter. I see the benefit in a sky reflecting texture.
You can set the image resolution to recover image quality. Image warping is another matter.
If you can not tolerate image warping you need to use unwrapping as the texture mapping method.
Before you establish a trust in create texture tool I would suggest trying it with simple geometries (fewer faces looking more or less the same direction) first.
Unwrap method may fail for (not too much) complicated geometries. Spherical projection needs to find a projection focus from which all the selection is seen from the same side. Let me try to give some examples.
Here is a cylinder textured with standard textures and methods ( cylinder works with regular texture method in SU.
In this case I selected the whole cylinder side and called create texture with png (we have a transparent section) as the image format and unwrap as the mapping method.
Observe that now we can erase the planar edges.
The newly generated texture is like this.
if we select spherical projection as the mapping method the created texture image is like this.
To be able to create a nice mapping I had to triangulate and upsample the cylinder.
The solid color (red) section contains arrows and edges drawn in it, these are sometimes useful, and easy to erase, in an image editor.
Similarly for the following house (ish thing)
for which the created texture is
In SU texturing ngones may be troublesome, I sometimes triangulate the faces just to be able to get a good uv map.
The attached skp file has the examples.
As far as I understand, create texture feature of Tgi3D amorph does exactly that (without messing the images) if you have existing textures on selected faces. Similar to the make unique texture for a set of faces without destroying image quality. You can try the trial version free for 30 days.
cheers
Ogan
@Roger, you are right about remote camera synchronization but the timing of the mechanical movements sometimes have variability, and some cameras need to be primed first. Grass usually has enough signal.
Tgi3D amorph create-texture method uses the existing texture image in creating a unique texture. You could try the trial version for 30 days for free.
Ogan
Water surface is too reflective for automatic surface generation in photoscan, but then again the small waves and froth might produce enough of a signal. For calibration and semi-automatic modeling this scene should be doable. 6 remote triggered cameras with 1/1000 shutter speed sounds exciting. you should be able to handle fast sports action with some accuracy. A sprinter (fastest) running around 10 meters a second would move around 1 cm in that 1 milliseconds. (that would also appear as a motion blur). If the synchronization of the cameras is better than 1 milliseconds you could get better accuracy by targeting (for drawing and calibration marking) the middle of the blurs. This is interesting because as of now there is no other 3D scanner of any sort that could obtain 3d models out of fast acting scenes.
(sorry for going off topic in a commercial sounding way)
cheers
Ogan
I gave it a try. The renderer is vray. Rendering time is > 30 mins (I quit checking after that). The basic shape is easy but I think it takes a lot of experimentation to get such a majestic wave as in the reference pic. I have no idea how to get natural looking froth and mist.
I noticed the same problem too. In general I add redundant soft/smooth edges to reduce the significance and help triangulation.
Ogan
I would suggest you give Tgi3d Amorph (upsample feature) a try. Trial for 30 days or for not too many faces training version (free) may work for you.
good luck.
Ogan
I can not see any provision in STL format to indicate softness/smoothness of an edge. So in printing edge softness/smoothness should have no impact.
Ogan
I agree with Adam. This is most probably an obscure bug which affects only a very narrow range of geometry.
Ogan
What you suggest made my concern more apparent. There is a miniscule difference between the two spheres, but appearance is significantly different.
In the attached case all the edges are soft and smooth, but the shading is not (on my graphic card at least). If I move any vertex tiniest bit the faces around it gets smooth shaded 
. Am I imagining this? Or is it some kind of feature? ...
cheers
Ogan
Hi,
To execute the warp you select warper component and issue warp command. For a certain group of transformations (all the bounding edges 3rd degree beziers (tricubic bezier)) Tgi3D is exact. If you can express your surface (or subsurface) as a bezier quad patch, warper can be used effectively. You can have a look at the example I am posting. This example is with full mode, If you can tolerate tiny edge misalignments, you can keep the component unique by using other modes of the warper.
cheers.
In our town (Izmir) every summer we have a couple of weeks topping 40 degrees. I have a southwestward looking wall behind a (roofless) patio covered with polished marble. That turned to be a bad design decision , past noon when the sun and its reflection shine on the wall its outer temperature gets above 75 degrees centigrade.
Check out http://sketchyphysics.wikia.com/wiki/SketchyPhysicsWiki.
To combine joints you will typically need intermediary groups. You can not have non convex colliding single group. You can use fixed joints for that. Face directions are relevant.
I suggest look at my grouping in the case.
Perfect 
, maybe too much so. To me the only tell of these renders are lack of minute imperfections such as dust, fiber pieces, smears, fingerprints, or dents ... Those tapes would sometimes crinkle similar to the seen segments even.