Posts made by Paul Russam

This is WIP but as it now working I can show it off, there's a fair bit to do to the interface to make it pretty but its ok for now:
** Link removed as the project is now live and we don’t want odd emails going to the client **
3DVista has what they call Virtual Staging which enables you to place additional images as overlays. I've used it to enable the future homeowners to choose their floor/carpets etc.
You can switch rooms using the menu in the bottom left and then select the element you wish to change.

The model has a crap load of tags and scenes as I need to knock out 49 panos which I then mask off to just the reqd overlay (eg 6x stair carpets) in Affinity Photo/Designer.

This will be one of 3 houses for this development so a total of 147 panos will eventually be rendered .... along with what I'd guess to be another 50% again due to amendments.

Thanks

Story time:
Last night I rendered the 49 panos of the 2nd house and spent most of the day painting the masking and then using it to isolate the floors, walls, cupboards etc.
At about 4pm my boss says “oh, and they’ve changed the doors to cream” so….
That’s the 49 of the 1st house and the 49 for the 2nd I rendered last night that all have to be re-rendered and re-processed and then the tour updated…. Fun fun fun …. Not

Another vote for SketchUp Texture Club, a wonderful resource and well worth the tiny fee. There are others but I almost always find what I want at STC.
If applicable, nearly all the materials come with bump, normal, displacement maps etc. there are some older materials that don’t but there’s a convenient button to filter the list(s) to only PBR’s (ones with the additional maps).
You also get access to a reasonable collection of whole room models such as kitchens, bedrooms etc.

I don’t know of a way to get a eq pano straight out of SU without rendering software but you could try this to convert the cube map you have to a eq.
https://360toolkit.co/convert-cubemap-to-spherical-equirectangular

The goto software is ptgui, it’s not free but there is a fully functioning version that watermarks the results
https://ptgui.com/

Edit, I’ve just re-read what you wrote and you mention already having and not wanting a 3rd part converter … Opps, sorry

Nice set, what are you using to display the panos?
If you’re doing a load of panos it maybe worth looking at the likes of 3DVista.

I’ve used SketchFab in the past … like so: https://skfb.ly/69nB6 or https://skfb.ly/68wS9

The process is damn simple:

• Export the model directly from with in SU.
  Do a bit of editing in SketchFab such as adjusting some materials, setting environment etc.
  Setup some view points
  Publish

Once it’s ready you can embed it in a page, they even provided the embed code.
If you want to part with some subscription money then you can add animations, remove branding etc etc

“There’s an app for that”
Try this: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/view-source-html-javascript-and-css/id917660039
It works but it hasn’t been updated in 7 years so could get culled if Apple enact their ‘remove of not updated’ policy.

There’s this one https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/source-3/id921385542
I’ve never used it and it’s not free.

That looks useful, thanks.

For those of you that use SU on MacOS there’s a new renderer on the playing field.
Enscape for Mac is in open beta and you can get it here: https://enscape3d.com/mac-open-beta/

Not all the features are in place yet but from what I see on the Enscape forum it seems quite good so far.

It’s a real time renderer so once it’s fired up you can walk around your model in real-time, you can make edits in the SU model and see them happen instantly in the render window, and render really really quickly, I can render a 4000x3000px image of any of the below models in about 2mins.

Here’s a couple of examples of what I’ve done with Enscape on PC:

https://youtu.be/NnZS5X4ABwI

https://youtu.be/qDcIFn6vimU

https://youtu.be/i1IziKsDOLg

Hi Mike, thanks!
I’ve considered doing something along those lines but then remembered just how poor a communicator I am
What I have thought about is showing someone else what/how I do things and then let them “tell the story”

Whilst I’ve had 2 goes at ‘being my own boss’ both resulted in me realising I’m a follower and not a leader.
I’m much better off as an employee with someone else setting the goals, as such I have no need (or want) to ‘promote my services’ but…. I would like to find a way to give back to the community.

Me too, all good now.
Thanks Anton

3DVista https://www.3dvista.com/en/
It’s a lot more capable that I use it for.

Thanks all for your comments
Here’s a bonus video, it was done for a client to post for xmas:

[bbvideo 640,480]https://youtu.be/5gyLI14Rz-Q
[/bbvideo]

A google street view of the real building with a billboard of my virtual images(s) which has a google earth background … Inception!
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.335979,-6.2422138,3a,75y,92.1h,95.72t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sxyFy57YMb6O0gHduWtl8Cw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en&authuser=0

Ha! No…. There’s a story to that one.
It’s a site in the centre of Dublin with full height windows so we knew from the start we’d need a photographic panorama taken with a drone (the building didn’t exist at this point).
The client said they could do that as “my sons got one of those” … well … it didn’t happen so… we found and booked a commercial drone biz to do it and they constantly “will do it next week when they’re in Dublin” … yea that didn’t happen either.
In the end I used the Google Earth desktop app to carefully grab a bunch of screenshots as I panned the camera around and then got them stitched together in PTGUI.

It’s not perfect but it’s good enough and certainly better than nothing at all.

I render the 360 panos using Enscape at which point they are just jpg’s like the photographed ones.
For most houses I’ll batch render render 20-30 panos. The initial 3DVista tour will take about an hour to setup and publish but after that I can re-render some or all of the panos, overwrite the existing jpg’s and republish the tour quite quickly.

Comp Spec:
i9-9900k
32Gb Ram
RTX2070 8gb

Enscape is a cracking renderer, I can knock out an 8k x 4k pano in about 4-5mins, 4k x 3k stills in about 2mins.
To do the anims I render 20-30 20sec 1920x1080 clips and mash them together in Resolve, I can do all of that in an afternoon.

Whilst I haven't posted here in quite some time I'm still SU'ing it full time.
99% of my stuff is rendered using Enscape, I haven't used Layout in so long that I don't even have a link to it in my taskbar.

Below are links to some of my panorama tours, I've got over 40 of them done since Covid shut down show homes.
https://www.tours.blockcpm.studio/moira-one-1a/tour/
https://www.tours.blockcpm.studio/moira-one-5a/tour/
https://www.tours.blockcpm.studio/percyplace/tour/
https://www.tours.blockcpm.studio/belcarra-d/tour/
https://www.tours.blockcpm.studio/rockryan/tour/

Here are some Videos:
https://youtu.be/ZVZhKV8zlKY
https://youtu.be/NnZS5X4ABwI
https://youtu.be/srT82wIO1Bk
https://youtu.be/394JrQATiUQ

Primary Tools:
SU ..... Obviously
Enscape for rendering
3DVista for the pano tours
Davinci Resolve to edit the videos
Affinity Designer for the graphics in the tours/videos
Topaz GigaPixel AI to enarge images

It’s an odd one for sure.
It seems Windows Defender keeps a local history of its scans/results and for some reason it can (in my words) add 2 or more past results and produce a false positive. I think this is why some of us are seeing the results above whilst others aren’t. I’m 99% sure it’s a false positive.

I've done the 1.7.7 through the Sketchucation Store twice now and each time Windows Defender is killing it as it sees part of it as a trojan.