Hello fellow artists!
I have joined the Sketchucation community because I am using Sketchup to reconstruct a village in The Netherlands in 1950 and 1900. This project started about one year ago. I didn't know how to use Sketchup then, but nowadays I know my way around modelling houses quite well.
My ultimate goal is to relive the past as realistically as possible. Making detailed models of the houses in the base for this. After one year, modelling a new (old) house has become routine for me. The downside of increasing knowledge about Sketchup is that it makes me improve my older models again and again. However it is worth the effort. I have now reached the point where my renders become almost indistinguishable from the real buildings, which still is a strange experience every time.
Apart from nice renders, I expect to achieve the beste experience using the Unity game engine, especially in combination with the Oculus Rift! I already spent quite some time walking and looking around in this virtual world, watching how everything looked like in the past.
You can watch a video on this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-Mozn7Sajw
Aside from the buildings, a lot of other things have to be modeled: trees, roads, fields, forests, shrubs, streams, you name it. This is the area I am still trying to find the best way to do it, so any suggestions are welcome.
tooling:
Sketchup: buildings, terrain, steam train and wagons
unity 3D: trees, game engine
playup tools: export from Sketchup to Unity
Maxwell render for Sketchup: render engine
I have two blogs on my project:
Virtual Time Travel http://serrarens.nl/en/ (English) about my design decisions, experiences and progress.
Hummelo Digitaal http://serrarens.nl/nl/ (Dutch) about the models themselves, press coverage and progress.
All is still in progress and I expect that it will take another year to completion, but I think the intermediate results are promising and already worth to look at!
Best wishes,
Pascal Serrarens.
