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Import SketchUp into Vue

Once in a blue moon e-on software comes up with an outstanding offer. This is one of them. Vue 7 Pro studio is half price. How good an offer is that? Well, put it this way, Pro Studio contains all the Vue Esprit expansion packs (seven of them) and they cost between $39 and $129 each. Pro studio is just $199, the same price as Esprit…

Check out the offer and further details on the e-on website.

SketchUp has topped a poll beating nearest rival 3dsMax by twice as many votes. The poll was taken on the website for new rendering software, Thea Render, the forthcoming “pay-for” version of the popular Kerkythea software.

The poll asked the question “I would like to see a Thea Render plugin for:”

Out of 1787 responses, 617 went to SketchUp, 268 to 3dsMax and 213 for Blender. Surprisingly, CAD offerings such as Revit and ArchiCAD both obtained under 5% of votes.

Information about the forthcoming release of Thea Render can be found on their website www.thearender.com

Some time ago I undertook to test the most popular rendering applications used with SketchUp. It took far longer than I’d anticipated! So I didn’t get any further than Kerkythea, Blender, Podium, Irender, Truespace and Vue. What I can tell you, for what it’s worth, is my conclusion on that small group.

Best overall renderer for SketchUp

My best buy recommendation for 2008 based on SketchUp integration, power and quality, and the ease of obtaining help, goes to Kerkythea. It can be downloaded for free at www.kerkythea.net/joomla

Best buy for external renders

When doing any amount of outdoor Architectural Visualization work it becomes painfully apparent that we are at the mercy of the “entourage” creators. A great render can be utterly spoiled in a moment by placing a dodgy tree in the scene. So when thinking about what render engine to use, you need to spend a lot of time weighing up how easily, cheaply, and render time efficiently you can put foliage into your scenes. My search ended with Vue Esprit. It’s simply a wonderful piece of sofware.

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A new book is due to be released by 3DATS entitled 3ds Max 2010 Architectural Visualization – Advanced to Expert. It’s 700 pages long, and it better be because of the massive $119.95 price tag! But if you get your credit card out straight away you might just be able to get the pre-order discount of $40. Offer ends May 7th 2009. If anyone gets a copy and wishes to post a review here, please get in touch.

When giving clients an idea of their new interior, or when trying to sell a property, a 360 degree virtual tour can be a quick and easy option to get accross the spatial information you need. If you have Quicktime viewer installed you can click on the following link for an example.

Interior Panorama walkthrough

This cost effective alternative to a walkthrough animation can save a lot of money, particularly if you have a lot of rooms to showcase. In addition, the small file-size and interactive nature of virtual tours make them ideal for the web.

Once you’ve set up a scene and gone through all the hassle of creating a photo realistic render, it would be a waste not to animate it too. Kerkythea imports camera animation info from SketchUp, or you can create them directly within Kerkythea. Output is in the form of still images which need to be stitched together. I use Virtualdub which is free and available at http://www.virtualdub.org/. Animations needn’t be spectacular because even something simple like this example will give depth and realism that the still image will always lack

Book review: Blender 3D: Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery

You’ve heard of Blender, right? Maya or 3D-max for free? And, like me, you maybe downloaded it and installed it? Did you have that heady feeling of anticipation, your excitement barely contained as you dream of taking the 3D animation world by storm… only to have your dreams shattered with the un-useable interface? Yes, I think that’s happened to many of us. But wait… pick you shattered dreams back off the floor. You and I might just have misunderstood Blender. We just needed a helping hand.

Cue the book by Allan Brito. In 316 pages Alan attempts to demystify Blender for the uninitiated, and I must admit, he achieves it. Now, I’m not saying after I read the book I became a Blender pro (I still find Blender frustrating and counter-intuitive), but the book allowed me to give a second chance to an excellent piece of software which I had dismissed completely. As an architectural visualiser, Blender is not your ideal software choice, but it can fit into your workflow. If you find your usual modelling, rendering, or animation software lacks some functionality, Blender will no doubt provide it.

The book’s aim

The book is written with the Blender beginner in mind, and as such does not attempt to cover the whole subject of Arch-viz. Instead, Allan chooses to open the door far enough for you to have a look in. And this, as we know, is the problem with Blender:  we can’t have a look in because it’s so counter intuitive to use. Having described the interface and keyboard shortcuts which will make all the difference, the book goes on to cover the basics of modelling, lighting, texturing and rendering. What’s especially useful is Allans dogged determination not to stray from the subject in hand. With the size and depth of the software, this would be suicide.

What you won’t like

It would have been good to see some more about import and export. In my opinion Blender is best used for animation once models have been modelled and textured in CAD or SketchUp, but there was no mention of this. The book also concentrates more on interiors than buildings or scenery.

Summary

A capable introduction to Blender as a stand-alone Arch-Viz application. Check out the book here.

If you need a source of backround photographs and entourage for your renders and proposals, look no further than one of the many royalty free image banks on the web. Royalty free means you pay a small fee to download the image, but you are then free to use it without paying any further royalties. In my opinion the two best (and lowest cost) are:

www.bigstockphoto.com

www.istockphoto.com

and if you want to know how much stock photos used to cost try www.fotosearch.com

A new version of Podium for SketchUp has just been released. It’s offered as a free upgrade to existing users. Podium now has support for multi-threading, decreasing render times if you have a dual or quad processor. Podium now renders images up to 4076 X 3304 pixels and is becoming a serious rendering application. Download a free trial at http://www.suplugins.com/.

SketchUp can be a great visualisation tool when used hand in hand with your own photographs. If you want to superimpose your design onto a photograph, bear in mind that your camera’s field of view is different to your default SketchUp f.o.v. giving the impression that perspective is all wrong. To correct this, you need to find out what your camera’s focal length is (usually 28mm, or 28-80mm for zoom cameras). You can do this by interrogating the xzif data held with your digital photo file (click on Properties: Details in windows Vista). The focal length value won’t always relate exactly to that in SketchUp, but a little trial and error, or some internet research, should show you what conversion factor to apply.

Check out the link below:

http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2008/05/setting-your-field-of-view.html