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:

Case study of a vaulted ceiling done with Sketchup

In the last chapter of this case study I will tell you how we did the ceiling. As we always do, we divide our model into groups: floor, walls and ceiling. In this way makes it easier to work with each part individually. In this figure you can see the different groups.



Once the walls were drawn and grouped to prevent bonding geometry with the ceiling we started modeling. The design presented no great difficulty except for the beams that interrupted the continuity of the vault. The first step was to create the arc for the vaulted ceiling. Since we needed only one face we used Vector Extrude Edges plugin by TGI. Using this tool is not necessary to have a face to extrude along an axis. With only defining the edge and a vector you can get a face. The vector in this case was the length of space to cover. The plugin can generate automatically a group.

  

Next, using the Offset tool, we made ​​a copy of the initial arc to generate the transverse faces of the beams. We draw these faces and with Push / Pull tool we completed the volume along the vault.

In a perpendicular plane we draw the sections of the transverse beams and with the Follow Me tool we created the beams along the arc.

  

Orbiting around to have a bottom view of the ceiling, we use Intersect with Selection to complete the missing lines of intersections and then we smoothed with Ctrl + Erase the intersection lines between the central beams. We grouped all the elements.

We unhidden all groups and this is the final result. Merry Christmas for all of you and a happy 2012!

How to prepare seamless or tiled textures in Sketchup

Preparing textures for SketchUp is a simple task. However, it must take into account the dimensions and how the texture will be repeated to cover a surface to achieve a seamless effect. In this project the carpet had four regions: bleedout, corner, border and field. The picture with the four textures was provided to us from which we had to create each of the materials and then apply them to different regions.

The pattern for the corner only repeated once and required no repetition. Using an image editor we cropped this portion of ​​the picture to get an image that would then be used to create the material in Sketchup.

From the same image we cropped the edge portion. This image as a material should be repeated in only one direction in a seamless way. Because of this fact, in the image editor in addition to cutting the new texture, we repeated the cropped image to check the appropriate continuation of the pattern. Once done this we saved the original image in JPG format.

This same process was repeated for the bleed-out area. In this case in the provided image, the pattern did not match exactly in the vertical and horizontal directions. That is why we had to take several steps before achieving an appropriate pattern that could be repeated in both directions without showing seams. The first step was to overlay the image for a larger area than could be cropped to achieve the repetition in X and Y. Once obtained the base pattern, we checked if it was matching in the vertical and horizontal directions. Then we saved the image.

For the 4th region corresponding to the field we repeated the same steps above.

Once obtained the necessary images we created in Sketchup the textures. This step-by-step process is explained in my book " Google SketchUp for Interior Design and Space Planning -Materials and Textures, the key for interior design” Course 3.

From the Materials window a new material is created using the image. In the Texture section you have to enter the real world height and width dimensions of the image. For example the image belonging to the field area it is represented 36 "x36". Once you have saved the texture select the Paint Bucket and apply it to the target face. If the texture does not appear according to the desired results it can be edited from the editing tab in the window of Materials.

After applying the new materials you will probably neeed to correct the position of the texture in some areas using the command Texture > Position. In this case we had to adjust the texture in the two short sides of the borders.

This is the final result.

These are some resources where you can create tiled or seamless texture.

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=46368

http://www.seamlesstexturegenerator.com/

http://www.pixplant.com/index.php