Using textures with alpha-transparencies in SketchUp

Textures with transparent background can provide an inexhaustible source of possibilities for photomontages of any kind, from an iron fence to a curtain.

To get an image with alpha channel you need help from an editing software. When you open an image in any of these programs that has a one color background you can use the Magic Wand to select it. Use the Cut tool and save the image as a PNG or TIFF that are the only formats that will allow you an alpha transparency – background defined as transparent – in SketchUp.

I always tend to use textures when modeling can be too much time consuming or when I want to keep the face-count low. In this example I will use an iron gate to explain the steps that you have to follow.

The first step is to take or find a picture in a front elevation to avoid any picture distortions. Then cut the background with a photo editor and saved it in PNG/TIFF format.

In Sketchup create a new material using the new alpha texture and applied it on a face. You can see in this picture the interior of the wall denoting the transparency.

Erase and resize the area to have just one tiled texture with the appropriate dimensions and create a component. Once you finish the rest of the geometry  edit the gate component and with the Shift+Erase tool hide the edges of the face.

Trimble/Sketchup acquisition

One week has passed since news broke of the acquisition of SketchUp by Trimble. I have spent many hours reading, analyzing, and why not say, having fun with the speculation. Many stories are full of testosterone and some are already up in arms. Actually I have a more optimistic vision that many and I want to share with you my personal opinion.

Trimble is no stranger to 3D modeling. Obviously it is looking to expand their existing market. Their experience in the construction industry can add value to an interesting future development of SketchUp.

On the other hand SketchUp has many valuable assets that I do not believe that Trimble will overlook.

• SketchUp has become popular because it clearly sets apart from any CAD system. It is intuitive, easy to learn, inexpensive (or free) and can be applied to any number of disciplines from geo-modeling to film making.
• It relies on the 3D Warehouse, the on-line repository to which the community contribute selflessly. It is invaluable to count with any type of libraries; even more is the ability to collaborate and share 3D models with anyone in the world or allow companies to show products of any kind.
• Access to a free community of developers that expands the work of the development team. Many plugins have allowed SketchUp to acquire complex abilities in modeling, BIM and renderings.
• A development team that has been at the forefront for many years. It was confirmed that most of the SketchUp team has agreed to continue working with Trimble. Knowing that the team that has brought up Sketchup to these days is still standing, brings peace of mind.
• However, what also makes SketchUp a unique product is not technology, but its community. It has 30 million users who are real passionate fans and are proud of the program.

With all these assets why would Trimble only make an engineering program for engineers? Trimble is a company that has grown steadily. It would make sense to shrink the purchased assets? They have expressed that they wish to carry SketchUp to the next level maintaining its existing functionality. The fact that changes will be incorporated, it does not necessarily mean it will remain exclusive of certain disciplines. As John Bacus –project manager of Sketchup- said “But this doesn’t mean SketchUp will be any less useful for folks outside that industry – one of the greatest things about SketchUp is its horizontal “3D for Everyone” appeal. We’ll never change that”. Any system is capable of being applied to a variety of needs beyond the initial concept for which it was created.

Google's mission worked in modeling the earth, irrelevant factor for interior designers; but this direction did not prevent the program could be used in many different other disciplines.

News reports indicate that Trimble and Google will combine their forces to keep the 3D Warehouse. This means that the visualization of models will continue to be present even for those who work in interior design. Therefore the contribution of the end-users will continue to live and current.

Paradoxically, what makes some people feel fear is the uncertainty of running a new roadmap with no maps or GPS (Trimble is involved in mapping and GPS technology)

For me, the value of Trimble in engineering and construction combined with the ability of Sketchup to display projects from early stage, its concept of non-CAD together with the 3D Warehouse and the great mass of users, have the potential to cover the AEC market like no other company has done so far. Anyway, we will have to wait. For now I don’t believe we will see dramatic changes during 2012; at least they don’t expect revenues coming from this acquisition.

Stairs in SketchUp

Although the stairs are utilitarian elements are often a focal point in the interior space. To create stairs with Google Sketchup is not difficult but it can sometimes take a long time and when not to say, somewhat repetitive and boring. That is why today I will show you 3 types of ladders made ​​with the Stair Maker plugin by Sdmitch that streamlines the process incredibly. The plugin is available in sketchucation.com

The plugin creates 4 types of stairs: Normal, Spiral (which is awesome to have this possibility), U-shaped and Ladder. The plugin offers different parameters which vary the thickness of the tread, wide, high and even angles.

In this post I will show you four stairs starting from the alternatives offered by the plugin and then modified. The first step shown below was made ​​by combining the options Normal and Ladder, using 1.5" Step Depth variable for separate steps.
To create the handrail and stringers it was taken advantage of the basic lines drawn by the plugin using the plugin Taper Maker by G. Terry Ross, at http://www.drawmetal.com/. This plugin let you align a face perpendicular to a path and so the tubular sections were completed.

This picture shows the components and plugins used for each.

The second step was done using the alternative Spiral with an angle of 30 degrees for each tread.

The previous design actually consists of 2 stairs to which were applied the Flip Along command to change the direction of the Run. In the below image the stair has a step angle of 15 degrees and a step depth of the same height as the rise.

The third stair seems complicated though by the curves but it was very easy to create it using the Normal option and Solid commands. These are the steps:

1. Create the stair with the Normal alternative.

2. Apply the Outer Shell command from the Solid tools to create a geometry with volume properties.

3. Create a second solid, to apply Subtract from the Solid tools to the Normal stair.

4. Subtract the curved volume using the Subtract function of Solid tools

5. Create another volume for the end of the last two or three steps and apply Outer Shell or Union of the Solid tools.

6. With Shift + Erase hide unwanted lines.

7. Taking advantage of certain lines created initially for the rail the rest of the geometry was completed. For the straight rail the plugin Balustrade with Components by TIG was used. A component was created for balusters using the Follow Me tool. Taper Maker plugin was used for the curved handrail. This image shows the plugins used for the creation of the rail.

I hope these tips can boost your imagination up next time you face to create a nice stair. 

Five Rendering Plugins Comparison. Part 2

I want to thank everyone who voted for an image and somehow helped me with this post.

Many are the renderings plugins offered. All have advantages and disadvantages. It is possible that those who have used one in particular have been pleased with the results.

Very different was the experience to start from the same model, interact with each plugin, and put the results next to each other. The approach of this post will probably have many diverse opinions as each professional is looking for a different scope when it comes to creating a rendering.

For the curious, the result of the survey resulted in a tie between the 3 images on the right. In order from top to bottom - Lightup, Shaderlight and Kerkythea. The two on the left correspond to SuPodium and Maxwell. Due to the dissimilarity of methods used by each of these plugins, I have decided to base my comments on a common theme when choosing Sketchup as design platform; primarily people use SketchUp because it is fast and easy. Although this analysis included biased and unbiased rendering methods I started with the assumption that the resulting images did not seek to reproduce the real world outcome but rather that they had an acceptable result in a short time.

Unbiased rendering refers to a rendering technique that does not introduce any systematic error or bias. However, a biased rendering method can still converge to the correct answer if the estimator is consistent. Unbiased rendering method therefore requires much more time on mathematical calculations, and are often used by professionals with high demands on lighting and definition. Using the unbiased method to generate a rendering in a short time invariably shows a lot of noise in the image.

In addition to these variables, this is a summary table of the variables we analyzed. I hope this helps in deciding which is the one that most fits your requirements.

	LightUp	SU podium	ShaderLight	Maxwell	Kerkythea
Rendering method	Biased. Ambient Oclussion for interiors	Biased. Interior scenes use Global illumination	Biased. Progressive ray-tracer and interior scenes use GI	Unbiased	Biased and Unbiased
Types of artficial lights	Area Lights, Points Lights, IES files	LEM, Omni light, Spot light	Point light, Spot light, area light, sky portal, IES files	Emitting materials, IES files	Inside Sketchup Point light and spotlight. Inside Kerkythea: IES light  and projector light
Materials	Material can be modified over the rendered image. Allows adjust, bump (map), specular(map), Reflections (fresnel), rugosity, IOR, with presets, animation of texture and color	Allows Difusse, Transparency, Reflection, Refraction(presets) Bump depth, Ligth Power	Allows settings Auto, Matt, Satin,Shiny, Glossy, Metal, Transparent, Traslucent, Self Illuminating. Every material has differents types of finish	Allows settings: Automatic, Plastic, Lacquer, Car Paint, Metal; liquid, Glass, AGS, SSS; Satin, Velvet, Complex IOR, Emitter, HDR Image, IES file. Each material has different parameters tos et. Allow to load their own materials in SU	Allow to import materials from the Kerkythea library. Materials editing is done in Kerkythea not in SU.
Max. Resolution	7014x 4919	Customizable	Up to 16000x16000 px.	1920 px, 800 px in demo	Customizable
Formats	Still (TIF), Cubic (TGA, JPG), Video(AVI), (FBX,TIF,TGA), LighUP Player(.LUCA)	png,jpg, hdr	bmp, png, exr, hdr, jpg, tga, tif	bmp, tga, jpg, png, tif, jpg2, ppm, bpm, pmg, hdr, exr	JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, HDR
Image correction	Allows	Don’t allow	Don’t allow	Don’t allow	Allows
Animations	Allows	Don’t allow	Allows	Don’t allow	Allows
Learning curve	Very easy	Very easy	Very easy	Complex	Complex
Learning resources	Short manual breve and tutorial videos online (1 hour)	Short manual and tutorial videos online.(50 min.aprox.)	Extensive manual and tutorial videos online.(1 hour aprox.)	Extensive manual and tutorial videos online.(1 hour 15 m aprox.)	Manual and tutorial videos online.
Price	$ 189	$ 198	$ 299	$ 95	Free
Scene adjustment time (lights and materials)	1 hour	1 hour	1,5 hours	2 hours	2,5 hours
Final rendering time	11m 17s (with resolution of  5mm)	1m 8 s (interior high)	10m 15s High Quality	1h 30m aceptable quality, still with noise. 3h good quality	17m (photon map high), 1h 30m aceptable quality (Metropolis), 2h 30m good quality (Metropolis)

Five Rendering Plugins Comparison

These 5 renderings were made with 5 different plugins using the same scene in SketchUp. I would love to receive feedback from you which one do you like more and if you dare, guess which plugins were used for each of the 5 images. Your feedback will help me with my next post.

Draperies, Curtains in Sketchup

Many of the comments that I often get is that Sketchup does not work for organic shapes and that it is too simple. Nothing more wrong to think that simple is synonymous of low capacity. SketchUp despite its intuitive and easy platform, it is able to solve really complicated models in much less time when compared with other software on the market.

Today I will show you how to make curtains and window treatments in Sketchup using Curviloft 1.2c and Fredo Scale, two free plugins developed by Fredo6. You can get both plugins in http://www.sketchucation.com. For drawing curves I will use Curve Maker available at http://www.drawmetal.com/download or you can also use Bezier spline by Fredo6.

After installing the plugins you can not only use them as it is shown in this post, but you can use them in a variety of organic shapes and even for furniture carving or molding. It took me less than a minute to create this carving using the mentioned plugins.

Curviloft essentially creates organic forms using loft junctions between surfaces based on Spline curves, following a given path or two paths.

Compared with other plugins that allow the creation of organic shapes it is extremely fast and efficient. 

In the first example I will show you how to make a valance.

I used a photo to mark up the main lines that will serve as contours for using the option based on Spline curves.

Having defined the contours I deleted the picture, leaving visible only the geometry.

Then I moved and placed some of the contours in the blue direction to create the folds of the fabric when using the plugin.

Once this step is done you have to select the Spline curves option of Curviloft and select one by one each contour in the established order.

This is the result.

In the second example I used Curve Maker plugin initially to draw the base curves quickly. I selected the option Cosine chosing as parameters:

I entered for sides “1” to allow as less segments I could. The other dimensions define the depth of the curves.

Once I drew the profile I placed it in the correct position and I exploded the groups. Again I used the option based on Spline curves of Curviloft to get the result shown here. For the curtain rod I used the option Following a given path.

The third example relates to swags with traversing sheers.

I started by drawing the dropped arc on top of the window and placed the contours that simulate the fabric folds.

I chose the option based on Spline curves of Curviloft and then selected the three contours in the shown order.

For the side panels I copied the straight curtain and then I applied Fredo Scale plugin. Using the Tapering with orientation of scaling box option  I hovered my mouse on top of the depth side and drag it to shorten it.

After, I applied the Planar sheering with orientation of scaling box to create the cascade and I rescaled the width to fold it more. I copied on the other side of the window and mirrored it to obtain the below shown result.

The last example is about how to make a tie back drapery.

Using the same profile that I used for the first example I copied them and scaled the groups to get different widths. I drew all the missing geometry to define closed contours in order to use Skinning of shapes option of Curviloft plugin.

After selecting contours one by one and clicking outside after each selection this was the result. (the tie was added after). With the Scale tool or the Fredo Scale plugin you can resize the folds.

Mirrors and Reflections in Sketchup

It is common for interior designers to incorporate mirrors and create effects of reflections and glare. While SketchUp does not allow you to see reflections in a mirror, there are some tricks to simulate this.

A personal wish is that someday one of the companies that create rendering software develops a separate and simple plugin that could reproduce the effects of a flat mirror, add a few reflections and some artificial light glare at a low price. I dream for a solution in between the full photorealistic image by radiocity that requires a significant amount of time, and the flat image offered of SketchUp. Meanwhile my wishes are heard, I provide some tips aimed at those who do not have a photorealistic rendering program.

When you want a reflection either on a shiny ground or from an actual mirror just flip your geometry and place a transparent color in the face of the mirror to create this illusion. Reversing and duplicating the room on the other side of the face where the mirror is, and then put a translucent face in front of it will add some realism although you still don't get shininess. I use this method frequently when I want to show two views of an image at the same time.

In this image I mirrored the room and applied on the mirror a texture with 50% of opacity. I also mirrored the love seat and the lamp and applied some ground transparency to mimic some reflexion on the floor material.

To perform this trick you should consider the following aspects. First, if the 3D model is too large duplicating the geometry can significantly increase the file size. In this case you just try to duplicate the objects or the portion of the model to be seen in the mirror. Create the replica as a component, thus any change in the original will be reflected in the replica. Insert the duplication of the model before generating the shot and place it in a specific layer. Create a scene with the active layer showing the shadows and reflections. It would be desirable for other scenes not to show these conditions to allow more rapid regeneration of the file.

Another way to create these effects when the file size is a drawback, is to take a shot of the image that you have on screen; turn it in texture and apply it on the area of ​​the mirror, and then discard the copy. It is important to know that if you change the point of view this picture will not follow the new vanishing points of perspective.
For the shiny mirror effect I look for a mirror image and turn it into a texture with transparent attributes that allow seeing the duplicated objects.

So here are the few steps that you need to follow

1.      Take the objects that need reflexions and convert them into a component.

2.      Copy and move them along the required axis.

3.      Next, mirror the copies with Flip Along or the Scale tool.

4.      Finally, paint the mirror or ground surface with a transparent material.

5.      Use Fog to create the illusion of depth and appearance to fade away

 

Note that if you are using Shadows like in the first image to turn off “On Ground” allowing this way the ground transparency.

With no shadows the image looks like this: