I picked up SketchUP my first year of architecture school back in 2002 and never stopped using it since. It is as powerful as it is simple, and yet I’ve seen too many pick up bad habits who find it hard to utilize SketchUP to its full potential.
So while I work on the continuation of the Making of ‘MS House’ – Part 1, Let me elaborate further and share some more of my SketchUP work-flow. Before I get specific about a few things, I should mention that it is good practice to have the manual comfortably nearby while modeling and I also highly recommend watching the SketchUP video guides. The information I’ll elaborate here will, hopefully, help you model fast and efficient with a great amount of control over the 3d modeling process.
This is a pure text post, so please bear with me.
When launching my blog, I mentioned in the first post that I plan to share thoughts & knowledge gained during my daily work, so I am very happy to introduce my first ‘MAKING-OF’ post. In part 1 I will cover topics starting from the initial DWG files manipulation and up to the point of exporting the SketchUP model to 3d Studio Max.
The motivation for this post started in the following forum thread on evermotion.org, a very popular CG Portal I frequent regularly and recommend you to visit too.
John Bacus, SketchUP Product Manager, posted some interesting news about the new Google SketchUP 8 release – or should I call it a little ‘heads-up’ notice for all the free users out there. You can read it all at the Google SketchUP Blog, but following are some highlights from it.
Adding something new
The new version of SketchUP will introduce COLLADA file format support said to be a 3D model exchange format that is open, extensible and public. The reasoning behind this is to provide a more flexible way of exporting (and importing) SketchUP models out for whatever the user wants.
“In our next release, we’re going to make COLLADA an official first-class format for all modelers. You’ll be able to import and export COLLADA models, as well as COLLADA models wrapped up in the KMZ format for Google Earth, with any version of SketchUp.”John Bacus, SketchUP Product Manager
I’ve seen this amazing video just now on my diver friend’s blog and was blown away by the shear beauty of it all and wanted to share this here too.
This was shot at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan.
The main tank called the “Kuroshio Sea” holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world’s second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 meters by 22.5 meters with a thickness of 60 centimeters. Whale sharks and manta rays are kept amongst many other fish species in the main tank.
When i first started out with architectural visualization i was very strict about doing it 3d all the way, but today almost every image i create incorporates some 2d techniques applied in post using software such as photoshop.
sometimes i add elements i didn’t have time to create in 3d or forgot about them. Other times i plan before hand on adding those elements and save time this way – especially if I’m not sure the client will approve them and this way i can just hide the layers. the technique I’ll describe in this post is especially useful and easy to apply in single focal point images.
