Google Sketchup Animation Tutorial Pdf
Sketch. Up Tips Tricks George Hi, Im George Maestri,and today were going to get organicand do some trees and grass in Sketch. Up. Now, this requires an extension that is partially free. So, lets go ahead and take a look at how we can find it. Now, the extension were going to look at todayis called 3. D Tree Maker. If I type that into my Extension Warehouse,it should come up. Google Sketchup Animation Tutorial Pdf' title='Google Sketchup Animation Tutorial Pdf' />And there it is. Now, Ive already installed this. Now, this is a partially free plugin. They give you some of the features for free,and then if you want to you can upgradeto get all of the features. And I find that the actual base featuresare actually pretty good,so thats why Im showing you this. Google Sketchup Animation Tutorial Pdf' title='Google Sketchup Animation Tutorial Pdf' />So, Ive already installed it. Go ahead and install it if you want. Now, once you install it,there are two places where it shows up,under Extensions we have 3. DArc. Studio Tree Maker,and we have a bunch of menu options. But most of these are duplicated herein this little toolbar that also comes up. And Im going to float this so we can look at ita little bit more closely. This is the first in a series of articles which will go through how to produce realistic renders. Each article will focus on a particular aspect or rendering, and. Now, the easiest way to use it is to simply press a button. So, we have a button for a tree, button for grass,we also have what are called proxies,which allow you display thingsa little bit more efficiently. Now, these trees are fairly detailed,so they may bog down your system, they may not. Just depends. And then we also can redraw all the trees. So, the main two buttons are the Tree and the Grass button. So, lets take a look at Tree. So, Im going to press the Tree button,and it brings us into this nice menu here. Now, this menu has quite a bit of trees. So, if I want to, I could say choose banana tree. Itll show me that. I could choose bamboo, a yucca. Google SketchUp Workshop Modeling, Visualizing, and Illustrating Edited by Laurent Brixius. Amsterdam Boston Heidelberg London New York Oxford. Want to put a logo or custom artwork to indicate a location right on a Google Map This episode shows you how. Youll need to sign into your Google account, and. Search the worlds information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what youre looking for. So really, any number of different types of trees. So, Im just going to go ahead and choosethis Generic Tree 0. OK. Now, when I do, it brings in this red outline,and this is what the tree will look like. And then once you click, then it will add in the leaves. So, Im going to go ahead and left click there,and theres my tree. And it automatically kind of zooms in so I can see it,and that looks pretty good. Now, this tree just shows upas an object in the outliner. So, if I go down to my outliner here,youll see it gives me the name of the tree. And if I want to, I could copy that,or do whatever I want. Now, this looks a little bit dark,but we can certainly change our viewto turn on shadows,and that will brighten it up a little bit. And as you can see, weve got the tree. Now, another thing we can dois we can turn trees into proxies. And when we do that,it reduces the amount of detail that it uses. And this will allow you to manipulateand navigate your scene a lot more quickly,particularly if you have a lot of trees in there. So, in order to get out of proxies,you just have to redraw all trees, and there we go. Now, the other button is for grass. Google Sketchup Animation Tutorial Pdf' title='Google Sketchup Animation Tutorial Pdf' />Download free sketchup plugins, sketchup tutorials, sketchup components, sketchup addons, sketchup materials, sketchup book, sketchup models, sketchup extension. So, in order to make grass,I do need to have a face selected,so it will populate the grass over a face. So, I have this kind of green fake grass here,so Im going to double click on this. This is a group, and Im going to select this face,and then I will press the Grass button. Now, its going to tell me what type of grass,so ratio of height, so whats the variation in the grass,whats the scale. Do you want to make proxies, which will be more efficientfrom a memory standpoint And Im just going to leave these at the default right now,and lets go ahead and just place instances. Now, this may take a little bit to populate,but once we do,theres our grass. So, now Im going to go ahead and double click out of this. And you can see that Ive got my grass here. Now, this is pretty thick grass. It has a lot of shadowing. So, this may not be appropriatefor just a standard Sketch. Up scene. But, if youre using something like a rendererthat will give you photorealistic rendering,this is a great way to go. So, 3. D Tree Maker is a really nice wayto get basic trees and grass into your Sketch. Sketch. Up Plugins Rendering and Animation Software for Sketch. Up. An Introduction to Photorealistic Rendering in Sketch. Up, using SU Podium. This is the first in a series of articles which will go through how to produce realistic renders. Each article will focus on a particular aspect or rendering, and how to use Podium to deal with each of these aspects in terms of creation of a realistic image from a very simple scene. If you are still reading, you will not only be interested in creating more realistic images of your Sketch. Up models, but you will also have a reasonable attention spanSome issues benefit from a little detailed explanation, but in all cases well try not to go into any more detail than absolutely necessary. It is aimed at the beginner to intermediate Sketch. Up user. It assumes you will have a degree of familiarity with Sketch. Up, and will be using groups, components, and drawing to scale. If you arent using these features in Sketch. Up, you need to learn how to use them, they are essential to effective modelling and rendering. It will take you from creation of a simple model, to rendering a fairly realistic image, by covering all the fundamental aspects of rendering. First of all, what do we mean by photorealistic rendering This question is not as easy to define as you would think. At its simplest, one could define it as the creation of computer generated images which look like photographs. This is very, very difficult indeed. It depends on accurately simulating the appearance of material properties, geometry, lighting, and camera effects. There are some excellent examples here. The basics to creating great renders are to use high quality textures, an appropriate level of detail, and to set the lighting up correctly. If we first consider materials, you might think that objects only have a very few basic properties like surface roughness or smoothness, colour, transparency and reflectivity. This is only partly correct as we will see later. With geometry, real objects have lots of irregularities, some are immediately evident, like warping, cracking, bending and misalignment. Others are very subtle and might not be immediately apparent if you arent looking specifically for them. The most obvious example of this is edges. Most people will model these as simple extruded shapes with sharp corners. If you look at a table for example, where the top meets the edges, there will almost always be a slight rounding. Its not sharp like a knife edge, there is a small curve. If you look at Figure 1 below, youll see that both the table and the tissue box dont have sharp edges, and there is a soft blurred or highlighted edge instead of a sharp one. Figure 1. example of soft edges. This changes the way the light falls on and reflects off surfaces. Little details like this can make a noticeable difference. Simulating this accurately would be very complex and time consuming, but there are some tricks to getting great results without overdoing the detail. With lighting, there are two basic types, direct and indirect. Direct lighting comes straight from the light source, indirect lighting is when the light bounces off surfaces onto neighbouring surfaces, causing shadows and illumination where you might not quite expect to find them. Figure 2 below shows both direct and indirect lighting. Figure 2. Direct light Figure 3 below illustrates indirect lighting very well. There is no direct sunlight at all, but the indirect light from the sky is bouncing down the deep narrow gap between the buildings and illuminating the walls, the street and even the underside of the balconies Figure 3. Indirect light. If you want to create really good renders, you need to balance direct and indirect light. Finally, with photographs, there are particular features that are introduced by the camera that influences the final image. For example there might be lens blur, lens length or camera flash. Simulating these things accurately involves a fairly detailed knowledge of each element, which is a lot of learning, yet people produce supposedly photorealistic images without all this detailed knowledge. How is this so To go back to the question posed earlier, What do we mean by photorealistic rendering, the short answer is that in computer generated imaging, the term photorealistic is relative, and is generally used to refer to the creation of images that look realistic as opposed to identifiably computer generated. The main SUPodium home page movie rather conveniently shows this very clearly and Podium has been designed to make the creation of these types of image as quick and easy as possible. The next article will deal with the creation of a simple scene for rendering, which will be used to explore the principles outlined above. Happy rendering This is the second in our series of articles which will go through how to produce realistic renders. Each article will focus on a particular aspect or rendering, and how to use Podium to deal with each of these aspects in terms of creation of a realistic image from a very simple scene. Part 1 was a general overview, this article goes into more detail about. Part 2, Textures. Good textures are vital to high quality renders. Generally speaking, the better your textures, the better your renders will be. They can make up for lack of detailed geometry in a scene, and this is particularly evident in computer games, where polygon count needs to be kept as low as possible to improve performance and increase the amount of detail in the scene as a whole. Well start by taking inspiration from a photograph. Modelling photos is a great way to develop your skills. The photo below was taken from the Architecture and Design blog The Absolution. Figure 1. Source photo We are not going to try to duplicate it exactly, because modelling the furniture is going to be an exercise in itself, and rather more complex than necessary for a basic introductionI have modelled the basic structure which you can download from here. I have applied the standard glass Material from the free section of the Podium Browser, and a water texture from Sketch. Ups standard library. Automatic materials in the Podium Settings dialog is on. Before we add textures, this is how it renders with the clay option turned on. Figure 2. Untextured clay render model I have used the 1. I have turned the physical sky off for now. Its close enough for the moment, so well start to add some textures. To start with, lets use some from the Textures folder of the Free section of the Browser. I have applied a stucco texture stucco0. First of all youll need to scale the textures up a little. Ive used a scale factor of 5. Ive assigned a little bump value of 2. DTR 9. 001. 0 for the tiles. The textures in the Free section are pretty good in that they are mostly seamless. However you can see that they have noticeable patterning. Installation Services Lowes here. Lets render this and see how it looks. First well need to reset the Sun Intensity and Exposure sliders and turn Clay off in Podium Settings. Figure 3. Render of textured model. So, although they dont have seams in the sense that you cant see the edges of the image being tiled, they arent truly seamless in the sense that you can see repeated patterns caused by patches of light and dark in the texture.