Lets talk content

[Satch_N_Mo]

I have to agree with J.P. that if we are going to talk on content lets talk.

I am a artist that works a dayjob in CAD. I am neither experienced with

3D other than I have always wanted to implement it. I had the idea to use cad to build a city with skyscrapers, the whole lot. Then use the perspective views to get a snapshot of a building for storyboards, comic panels, etc. Now I am excited (from the galleries) of the potential of Sketchup. I am comissioned right now to do conceptual art for an "edutainment" game on the computer. The game board will consist of a path like "Monopoly" and as the user goes around the game he will see the fronts of 3d buildings. Well, I am there to draw them "conceptually" (I sure am using "" alot) and go through the approval process before they are modelled in 3d. Typically I'll draw the building front/sides/top in cad and open in Adobe Illustrator to apply gradients and fills of color. It is tedious and if I could have done the buildings in 3d easily first and exported them to the 3d artist we could have saved $$$. I am looking to invest in this product but have some concerns about the finished look of some of the gallery shots on their website. Are these images (of hotels/mansions/etc) rendered all in Sketchup? Or is there an add-on that the artists have used or exported to better (and more expensive) software for their renders?

[Edgar]

Sketchup is just a modeler (a great one at that). Most of the photo-realistic stuff shown on their forums and galleries are done after the model was exported. Sketchup can export to a multitude of programs, so if you have something you use already, it is probably supported. Sketchup can do a sort of sketchy render, and that is exactly what you see on the website itself as graphics, but the galleries can be a multitude of programs that actually did the rendering, anything from 3D Studio max for photo realistic renders, to Photoshop for a more artistic and custom look. If you read the gallery posts carefully they are usually good about telling you what program they used to render.

This is a nice rendering here:

it was exported as .obj, and then rendered in Kerkythea

this one here was done with an exported 2d image and Photoshop:

but plain old sketchup will give you stuff like this:

not bad, but a little plain.

Hope this helps.

[Satch_N_Mo]

I agree. It is plain, but if your model is detailed it will look great just using sketchup. Most client's eyes will pop at that level of detail.

Great, Thank you for your response.

-Satch_N_Mo "Hey Mo!!!!!"

[Kris Krieger]

"Satch_N_Mo" wrote in news: [e-mail]:

[ ... ] I am looking to invest in this product but have

CAD-based programs typically don't seem to have the same lighting/rendering quality that 3D modeling/rendering software has. I say "seems", only because my comment is based upon what I've seen - more specifically, I hadn't tried the Sketchup demo because the price is more than I can afford, esp. since I already have a 3D modeling/rendering program.

Check the archives, because there was a rather in-depth thread here a few months ago re: CAD and 3D-modeling software.

I admittedly haven't used many different 3D modeling programs. With mine, I can draw a floorplan in another program and import it as a DXF file, then select the face(s) of the DXF object, separate them, and sweep them to create shells.

I would think that any good 3D program will allow you to do this. And do good renders as well, once you learn about lighting (often called the most difficult things about doing 3D...) Main thing is what type of interface you want. Lightwave is heavily/entirely menu-based, from what I could tell, and I hated it, but a lot of people like it - just depends upon how you prefer to work; I think (but am not sure so check) that 3DSM is also menu-based. Some people still ridicule trueSpace as a "toy" but that's because they're ignorant about what one can actually do with it, and because the icon-based GUI confuses them. I personally love the program, and the company (

) also continues to sell less-expensive older versions that still do very decent renders, which allows people with smaller budgets to at least get started. I don't recall what formats Sketch-Up outputs, but trueSpace imports and exports a variety of file- types. Many 3D-types use both CAD and 3D-modeling/rendering software because it suits how they work.

Again, check the archives, because a lot of folks here offered some good info.

HTH :) !

[Edgar]

Yeah your right. I've seen some really good rendering purely from sketchup, with the right amount of detail. The best sketchup renders I've seen have been large city planning or tract type models.

[RicodJour]

SketchUp will give you plenty of detail right now, and will allow export to many others for detailed rendering. Another bonus - SketchUp now has a plugin for Google Earth. I'm not sure if your city is a real one or fabricated, but if you wanted to do NYC, for example, you can toggle the "buildings" switch and get a quick 3D perspective of the NY's buildings in greyed-out massing model style. Then you can plug in your designs to populate it with your required amount of detail.

R