@gaieus said:

Well, be careful with that "plotted" render. You may bounce into image size limitations due to SU being a 32 bit app and using limited memory.

You can get out about a 4000x3000 pixel rendered image however that would be 40 inch wide (~1m) at 100 dpi (on the wall, I believe you would not need 300 dpi).

MAYBE if only using colours, it can be a bit bigger, too. If you use Twilight as Pete suggested and export the XML, that can be opened in Thea as well and it has a 64 bit version, too, which of course could export bigger.

Excellent advice, thanks. Never considered the fact that SU is 32 bit.

I do believe that they'll want a 24 x 36 plot of the system, but I would love to see it be 36 x 48 and properly matted and framed.

So in light of this, would you suggest going with Twilight rather than Podium?

Thanks for the words of wisdom. Encouraging to know that Podium will probably be a good choice.

I do have my models pretty well component-ized, so hopefully assigning materials to them won't be too much of a task. I can stick with just using colors rather than textures for nearly the duration of this project, as the purpose of the project is to pretty much use SketchUp as a BIM tool to find interferences across the assorted phases. At the end of the project they'll be asking for a rendered picture to be plotted out and framed. I'm pretty excited to see how that will look.

They will also ask for a box animation and a forklift animation, but both include the manipulation of the static model, so I'll just need to find something that will allow me to make a camera path throughout the system and not actually make boxes zip around it. I have played around with Sketchyphysics a bit, but I think animating tens of thousands of boxes on the system with it would be a nightmare.

Something tells me, as I watch this topic get lower and lower down the page, that the answer may be simple.

I'm basically a novice when it comes to the world of 3rd party applications, so can someone tell me if 1. Podium would be right for something this massive (a parcel system inside a 250,000 square foot bldg)? and 2. if I need to utilize materials when rendering (or just using different points of light).

Thanks.

@tk0001 said:

Also, is there a good SketchUp viewer that allows the client to rotate and zoom in and out of a model? I could just have them download SketchUp for free, but I don't want my library to be available to anyone but me.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can lend.

Alright, I just found SketchUp Viewer. Forgive me for not using Google prior to asking this one.

Also, is there a good SketchUp viewer that allows the client to rotate and zoom in and out of a model? I could just have them download SketchUp for free, but I don't want my library to be available to anyone but me.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can lend.

I am independent contractor and have been using SketchUp Pro 7 to create 3D layouts of various parcel handling systems. So far it's been pretty small stuff like what you see below:

[IMAGES REMOVED]

I have now been asked to provide pricing for a job as big as this (this is not mine, and not in SketchUp):

[IMAGE REMOVED]

As you can see, I'm not currently using materials. Everything I've done so far has just been colored bylayer and only has one point of light (sun). If I were to do the job asked of me, I'm thinking I would definitely need a 3rd party program that would be able to render with different points of light. My first question is, if I were to use a program such as this, would I have to assign materials or could I just keep everything colored bylayer?

My fear is that assigning materials would make the file size much bigger.

The customer would also ask for animation in the form of a camera affixed to a box and traveling around the conveyor system. I have tinkered around with Podium and that seemed to have the ability to assign camera paths, but it's been awhile since I've played around with it.

Could someone point me in the right direction and offer opinions on which 3rd party software to get for a project such as this? Any other words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated as well.