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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.

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.

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/.

Rendering courses often touch on architectural visuals, but it’s unusual to find training aimed entirely at Arch-Viz. When you do find it, it’s expensive, which is why we’re happy to plug the forthcoming 3DATS training event. If you book before June 15th the two day (18 hours!) course is just £425 including lunch and refreshments!

Check out http://www.3dats.com/london/ for further details.

A word of advice concerning software. Even if you don’t use the particular software used in the training; rendering is basically about lighting, texturing and composition, so most of what is covered should benefit no matter what your favourite software is.

Click here for an interview with Matt Ellis, Maxwell Render specialist at Cityscape 3D. Maxwell is acclaimed as one of the most realistic light simulators on the market, as you can see from Matt’s images. It comes with a good selection of bundled materials for most architectural requirements, with a large online community continually adding more. Check out www.maxwellrender.com for more details.

Kerkythea is a free but highly capable rendering program with great SketchUp interoperability. A new version is just out – see the following announcement for some more details. (We can’t pretend to understand what all of it means – but network rendering to unlimited Linux machines! – wow):

Kerkythea 2008 Echo is a full staging application for rendering your
models. And now it’s available for all major platforms Windows, Linux,
and MacOSX!

Introducing the Kerkythea Instancing Brush (Earning KT2008 the name
“Echo”)
It features instancing by loading the “Brush” with any model or group
of models and painting (scattering) instances of that onto any model
“canvas” object you choose. Or, you can choose auto-population of the
canvas determined by grid, or driven by image mask!

Now featuring MLT(BPT) Metropolis Light Transport on top of
Bidirectional Path Tracing to handle the most demanding indirect lighting scenes.

Robust and completely re-vamped material editor featuring nk/ior
measured data support, synthesis layer, procedural ramps, improved materials
and the new plugin SDK for user developed customized objects.

Also featuring:
-15-25% general render speed increase (more for MLT render mode)
-Multithreading support for all render methods
-Network rendering to unlimited machines/threads/cross-platform
(requires manual connection)
-Instancing and grouping of Lights or Models
-Sky Portals, Supersampling
-Physical Camera definition enhancements
-Parallel View Rendering for plans/elevations, etc.
-IES Light implementation
-Specular, Light, Diffuse, and Diffuse Texture passes
-Improved depth map rendering
-alpha channel auto-recognition for .png and .tif files
-More widgets (Drop and align commands, manual sun positioning)
-and much more

Kerkythea now supports a zipped xml version (kzx extension) for saving
files, which, combined with instancing, can result in file sizes 5% to
10% the size of previous versions’ saved .xml scenes.

The new cross-platform plugin SDK implementation allows users to write
their own plugins including new procedural textures, materials and
lights.

See the following link for download info:
http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42&func=select&id=2