@starwarsknower said:

Hi all,

I'm making a scene of my living room, and want to know if anyone has any tips on making high detail fabric-looking chairs. I have tried the subdivide and smoove plugin, but it makes it too small and too rounded, and ideas?

Remus is right -- there's more than one way to use subdivide and smooth.

By "too small and too rounded," you seem to mean that you're trying to create something like a typical couch cushion from a flattened cube. If you do that directly, you do get a smaller, round shape like a throw pillow. If you do it in steps, you can get just about any variation you want:

The back row is a simple shape, SS'd once, then twice.

The next row adds a pre-subdivide without smoothing, then SS'd once, then twice.

The next two rows show the effects of additional steps of pre-subdividing before smoothing. Somewhere in those results is a cushion shape that will work for you...

Sweet!

Here's someone with a job worse than yours...

It looks like it's right off the page of a high-end tool catalog.

Very nice!

Obviously designed by some clown with SketchUp:

Check out this cloth physics demo, then click through to the description of Verlet Integration on Wikipedia.

The formulas given are Greek to me, but can anyone tell if this sort of thing could be implemented in Ruby?

Here's my truck. It's really good in snow...

That's my front yard in the background (I'm in the Colorado Rockies at 7500').

Wow, Solo -- low poly birds are really easy to manipulate. I haven't actually tried to make anything that's low poly, but there's some interesting flocking potential...

Ouch! An unfortunate injury for someone who sits in front of a keyboard and monitor for a living. You have my sympathy, sir.

Put lots of holiday "spirits" into that eggnog to numb the pain...

@unknownuser said:

So, i was happy to have achieved my goal and decided to share with those who helped me.

Congratulations on solving your problems with Sketchup, and thanks for sharing your success with the forum...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year...

Fantastical, indeed. That must be a future Los Angeles -- I recognize that smog layer...

Great work.

Sometimes I get so involved with my stuff, I fail to check out the other posts on the gallery for a time. I apologize for missing this one earlier.

Exquisite!

@unknownuser said:

i did some more renders , and think one of them is better ....

I love the first one. The out-of-focus foreground gives it a seriously close-up feel, and the lighting on the dented apple in the back is perfect.

This image belongs on one of those "you won't believe it's not a photograph" postings that pop up on DIGG every now and then...

@kwistenbiebel said:

I am wondering though...shouldn't the neck be stretched when in flight?

It seems to be optional with egrets. I found reference pictures with the necks in many flying positions, but the most common were in the configuration I used.

One thing I didn't do was to copy the true shape of the neck when it is contorted into an "S" shape. These birds have only seven neck vertebrae, and such long necks mean that each neck bone is rather long. I think the sinuous image looks better than the lumpy neck shown in photo three, below, and since I'm not doing nature illustrations that require super accuracy, that's what I did.

And thank you for the kind words, sir. At this point, it's not so much skill as persistence..

Thank you all for the comments. Yes, it took a lot of patience. I didn't keep track of time, but I probably spent 30 hours on it in 1 and 2 hour sessions.

As for posting on the Podium forum, this is my very first Podium render, so I'm an absolute novice with it. I used the stock "noisy" parameters, and let it run to ~300 on the meter. I did use 100% on the quality sliders, and I have a dual core CPU. I didn't time it.

Speaking of renders, SketchUp itself doesn't do half bad with this model. Here's a direct export from SU:

Like my other stuff, this model is assembled from parts. Here's the egret's head, before and after SubSmooth:

And if any of you would like to play with the egret's head, here's the SKP of the above pic:
EgretHead3.zip

"Rock!"
"Scissors!"
"Uuhh.. Stick?"

I'm getting better at this, although it still takes me quite a while. This is an SU Egret, rendered in the free version of Podium:

I saved some screen captures from the construction...



And here's a composite over a photo of the Everglades that I found on line...

Too rich for my budget, I'm sure, but very nicely done model, sir.

That's really nice. I've been thinking about putting up my sketchup models on a page that my kids and grandkids could download and play with. This would be a great piece of hosting software.

I'm assuming that I could load the .zip file option with a .skp file rather than the image, or is the .zip automatically created from the image?

In any case, I'd probably buy a copy if it wasn't too pricey...

@gaieus said:

Sorry Tezer for this (and others for being OT) but I coulnd't stand posting this:

When I was reading the word "semi-retired", I actually read "semi-retarded" and although immediately saw that I was wrong, I started laughing just to make the same mistake when I go to "fully retarded".

I don't know what's wrong with me today (maybe wek-end is coming) but I just see jokes all around.

Please don't think that I'm a booby,
'Cause I want to write some Ruby,
As a way to have some fun when I'm retired.

And I'd hate to be regarded,
As a Teezer who's retarded,
While I'm pickin' up the skills that are required.

But my query needs solution,
Not some endless thread pollution,
Is there an answer to the question I inquired?