It's become a habit now and I have to set up my shortcuts like this on any machine I use. I set up my shortcuts around WASD when I was first learning sketchup years ago and now I find it really efficient. It seems off but for some reason it made sense at the time and I was wondering how other people have their shortcuts setup.

Basically I have W for orbit, A for pan, S for select, D for push pull, then all my draw stuff is around those keys. Q is draw line, E draw rectangle, R draw arc, T tapemeasure, F is offset, spacebar is move, Z is scale, and X is paintbucket. So now I fly though sketchup models like I'm playing a videogame and working in sketchup any other way is almost impossible for me at this point. I can't imagine using sketchup any other way, if you're bored give it a shot it feels really natural.

I'm mainly comparing shaderlight, podium, twilight, and a couple others in this range and between shaderlight and podium I haven't really found any huge differences and they are the same price. I have just grown used to having a huge library of pre-made fixtures and it saves a lot of time lighting a model especially when the architecture is not the focus of my models.

Having 350+ light fixtures that are very well modeled and preconfigured with lighting that I can throw in is a pretty big bonus for me. There is also a nice selection of other high quality materials and components. It may not be a deciding factor for some people but when everything else is pretty much the same it might be.

Thea looks really over my head and I have very little idea how to use it but I am intrigued. 3D modeling is incredibly addicting and ever since I got my hands on some evermotion plant collection demos I have wanted to find a way to use them.

I am really loving sketchup and for landscape architecture the only thing I'm disappointed with is limited plants when there is some crazy high poly stuff out there I have wanted to use. I am used to podium one click rendering so this is intimidating.

Are there tutorials and things I can look at to get started? How can I integrate thea into my sketchup workflow where I do most modeling in sketchup then plants in thea? I'm not really sure how it works and how much more time I am looking at compared to something like podium or shaderlight. I am probably going to end up using both and looking into the thea route for high profile presentations. How does thea handle grass? I really just have no idea what I'm getting into here and appreciate any help/patience.

How is their selection and how do the programs stack up against podium? I can get crazy fast ~1 minute excellent quality renders with podium and it is very easy, it seems to not be popular here though I wonder why.

So I have been using Podium V2 for a while and I really like how it has a materials library with preconfigured textures and mainly a ton of preconfigured light fixtures you can just dump into a model and render. They have some other good materials too which are preconfigured.

My trial is about to run out and I'm looking into other options before I buy it. I don't hear much about Podium on here and I wonder why that is... I hear a lot of talk about shaderlight but does it have a materials/component library of preconfigured render-ready stuff? What about the other $200-$300 solutions? Why should I look at shaderlight over podium?

How do you guys use styles in your modeling?

For me I have found most of the styles other than the basic ones kind of pointless for my purposes. I pretty much just use standard and some of the night ones that go along with Podium. Other than that am I missing anything by not incorporating styles into my renderings?

I also find myself not really incorporating scenes into my workflow and I'm sure I could benefit there, it's just not something I ever did really. I will occasionally add one for night but in general I wing it and just place the camera in various spots and render. I'm sure I could benefit from setting up some standard views. How do you incorporate scenes?

Hmm, it looks like a good solution compared with what's out there. $700 to start is still a big investment up front and hard to justify. If it were around $300 I would definitely get it which is why I may go with formfonts for a 2 year subscription for 300 (1 year for 200) and the selection looks comparable plus a lot more non landscape components. Who knows I will probably end up getting it at some point it's just hard to make the case that I need $700 worth of components. With this pack I'm not really interested in the 2D components since you can find those easily in other collections and I can make just about any 2D face me component in 10 minutes or less. I can't however model a 3D plant in any timely manner so I'm only really looking at the 3D stuff in the value.

It looks like a great product just pricey. I would like to get some feedback as to how a lot of this stuff renders and see more examples.

Anyone use Land F/X?

@earthmover said:

Patrick the plants are most likely a mix of Evermotion - http://www.evermotion.org/modelshop/show_product/archmodels-vol-61/48/0/0/ and Artlantis. They are very high poly and wouldn't work in sketchup without some serious polyreduction. They are most likely placed in Artlantis Studio. Some prior renders contain plants that come with Lumion.

Would they cripple a model/render times? Right now I can render a nice sized model with hundreds of 2d plants in under a minute on this new machine. If it took 15-20 minutes to render a more complex scene with 3d plants that's manageable. I'm more interested in 3d groundcover/shrubs

Wow I found instant roof for quick house modeling. This will save me a ton of time...

What other plugins can I use to model buildings quickly? Are there any plugins or one stop solutions for quickly putting windows and doors on buildings? Going to the 3d warehouse and modify everything is kind of a pain and it's hard to find collections of all the same kind of stuff. Also I'm sure this is a basic question, is there a way to quickly cut out the shape on a surface where a component intersects where it is glued? So I can just plop windows and doors on and have them cut holes so light can come through?

@dorfpunk said:

$700??? wow that's nearly as much as my computer. Formfonts - Is it worth it? For me, I don't use 2d stuff at all because I do walkthrough/flythrough things for everything I do and they look weird for that so high quality 3d plants are kind of neccesary.

Formfonts looks good and I'll probably get it but still the selection alone is far from sufficient. Where else should I look?

Mindblowing. The sheer volume of amazing renders you are pumping out is crazy.

I have a lot of questions... First and foremost, where do you get all those plants?? I really need a lot of good tropical plants for my models and am not sure which service to look at. What about other components? How much of that is modeled froms cratch and how much are parts you find? Is that all modeled in sketchup? What plugins are you using?

I really need those plants, I appreciate your help. The level of detail is amazing, how long have you been 3d modeling to get to that level?

So is formfonts worth it? Looks like a pretty good deal. I was looking at dynascape but the price is crazy at $700 for the first year and the plants don't really look very photoreal but looks like a good selection. 2D face me plants are good for trees but 2d low plants don't look so great... Anyway I really like what you used and I'm looking to expand my plant collection.

how does twilight compare to podium? That looks really good, and if anyone can link me to those plants I would appreciate it

@gaieus said:

I sometimes use two planes of grass texture - one below with a completely opaque material and one above with the same material but with transparent areas.

Not perfect of course but especially with animations, there is a nice "play" of these two planes (and with PR renders, even the tiling is much less noticeable). See an example below (learnt the trick over the KT Forums a couple of years ago - of course, you can have a much nicer top material with actually grass blade shaped "holes burned" into it).

wow that looks really good! especially rendered. thanks.

@unknownuser said:

Fair enough. I would still be careful to keep it as an option though. You could use that same option to argue against any sort of post processing work. In the end you'll end up with a consistent image (the test/progress images will be just like the final output) however that final output won't look as nice as it could if you did some photoshop work to it. Alternatively, you could explain that the test/progress images won't be to the same level of detail as the final output to come later. This is typically quite acceptable in my experience.

-Brodie

I'll definitely consider post processing if we have to do any big presentations. I'm just looking for a quick solution now, I'm experimenting with Podium grass textures with bump maps and they look a lot better than what I was getting before. I may try that and maybe add a thin border of 3D grass with it so you can see the texture against the edges, I saw someone do that here and it looked good.

I would like to avoid having to bring it into photoshop since a lot of what I am doing is conceptual and I often need to make changes, render a few stills, and show a client in a short time period while they're in a meeting. So if I'm asked to show something slightly different in the model I can just make the changes and re-render instead of having to re-render then bring it into photoshop. It saves a lot of time then I can render a bunch of different scenes without having to modify each one.

@honoluludesktop said:

Partick, What is your role in the office? It sounds like you work as part of a team. Is your primary job to conceptualize landscape designs, to model a design for presentation, or to model and refine a design with the intent of doing construction documents?

Right now I am doing a lot of modeling for conceptualization/preliminary design and some presentations. We're not using it for any construction documents but I would like to be able to at least find a good way to use the model to speed up doing final drawings.

earthmover- Yeah I'm trying to learn a lot quickly and I would just like to learn as much as possible so I can work better. Just from what I've learned in the past week with plugins and some new techniques it's all become part of my natural workflow so I see no reason to slow down. I'll take a look at some of that stuff, thanks!

I was going back into CAD mainly to reshape terrain because I was having issues shaping terrain with odd geometry made with the from contours tool. I think terrain reshaper will take care of that and now with the contours plugin I should be able to do it all in sketchup then bring a rough grading plan back into CAd when I'm done. That book is definitely on my list, is there a lot more in it than in his videos? I've been using the scale and rotate multiple plugin but it doesn't skew and distort components like I'm looking for and rotate doesn't help for 2d face me plants. I saw a pay-for randor plugin on smustard that looks like it does that for 3d trees and I wonder if it would do anything to 2d components.

I have CAD elevations for new projects and I'll have to play around with some ideas. I kind of like the clean rendered look so I need to model some detail- I'm wondering if there are any plugins that help to automate and speed up exterior house building.

Is there a plugin that you can use to create contours at certain intervals from a surface? Basically I want to edit and create topo in a model then be able to run a plugin that will generate contours which I could then export back into a CAD drawing.