- SketchUp 2014 for Architectural Visualization（Second Edition）
- Thomas Bleicher Robin de Jongh
- 596字
- 2021-07-16 11:47:36
Saving days of toil with ready-made scenery
Robin once spent four days modeling scenery, people, trees, and streets full of buildings in order to finish off a view. The new building itself had only taken a day to model! In order to avoid this, most professional architectural visualizers make heavy use of paid-for entourage (trees, people, cars, buildings, and such) to liven up a view.
Of all the important developments that have made 3D computer visualization what it is now, the availability of digital cameras must be the most important factor. You will already have come across the basic techniques you need. The rest will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, Applying Textures and Materials for Photorealistic Rendering, and Chapter 6, Entourage the SketchUp Way.
Billboard scenery elements
Virtually, any photo you take or find on the Internet can be turned into a scenery element. Take this one of wild horses, for example. Would you have ever thought of using an image like this in an arch-viz scene?
However, horse lovers need a home too! The rendered-up version made it to the finals of a rendering competition, which was designed to show off the capabilities of IRender without doing any postprocessing in Photoshop. All I did was to cut out the foreground, mid-ground, and background from the same image and set them up, as you can see in the following screenshot:
All you need to remember when doing this is that the further away from the camera the billboard image is, the larger it will have to be, so the individual cutouts will need to be resized by eye. Here's how it came together. This is purely a SketchUp output without any rendering. You can see the cutout edges in black, in the following screenshot:
Tip
Harnessing the plethora of online images
In Chapter 6, Entourage the SketchUp Way, we will look at the best place to obtain images on the Internet, to turn them into entourage. However, don't forget to use them here too.
Creating billboard elements
We create billboard elements as follows:
- Insert your image into SketchUp somewhere out of the way.
- Right-click and select Explode.
- Double-click to select and then turn the selection into a component.
- Copy it using the Move tool with the Ctrl key pressed (Option on Mac).
- Rotate the copy upright (90 degrees).
- Place it where you need it. Scale as necessary.
- Now, go back to the first copy. Double-click on it to edit it.
- Select a plan view by navigating to Camera | Standard Views | Top.
- Draw over areas to be clipped and deleted. The in-place component automatically changes too.
Tip
You can download this SketchUp scene from the download section of this book at www.packtpub.com/support.
When you import and explode images in SketchUp, they behave in just the same way as any rectangle surface with a texture applied to it. So, you can draw on it and erase sections. This can however be difficult when your image is in position, because it might be at a weird angle or obstructed by other items. Using this technique, you have the image lying horizontally in the plan view, so you can draw over it in a flat 2D view.
The following image is what the horses looked like when they were clipped. As you can see, you could create whole scenes just with photos and no other modeling at all!
However, usually, you would use this technique to insert a foreground image of foliage or people and a background image of, say, a city or country scene:
