bjornkn

For those who don't know - Vray isn't the only renderer for SketchUp. There is a great renderer called Thea render, http://www.thearender.com/cms/ , which offers realtime fast interactive GPU rendering (biased or unbiased) inside or outside SketchUp. Works great

I realize that the thread is old, but IMO it still needs to be some more info here Take a look at on Youtube, which shows how architect Nick Sonder uses SketchUp/Layout for the whole process, including all construction documents. There is a lot of power in Layout (which isn't available in the free version of SU). There is also a series of clips on Youtube showing Sonders work process. Starting with :

I would've used a longer focal length, and hence less perspective. I would also move the camera to the left so that the side wall is no longer visible. I think that will make it blend better into the strange ortho/linear pano background. Unless it's supposed to not be aligned to the road?

If they get tesselated you may need to change smoothing angle? You may also need to merge points, because the 3ds format apparently denies uv mapped meshes to share vertices, and thus you end up with a lot of separated tris that needs to be joined to render smooth.

Well, if the background images are to be those mosaic linear panoramas at least you don't have to worry much about camera matching... As long as you put the house at the right altitude and scale it's gonna look more "correct" than the background ;-) I'd say that maybe the next step should be to go there and shoot some new and better panoramas - unless that's really how your client wants them to look?

Your project consists of two separate jobs, modeling the building and compositing it into the photos. I would model the actual building in a separate scene file in SU, and then model the site with exisiting buildings etc on sparate layers. Then I would load the other file (building) as a component into a new Layer and place it according to the site plan and exisiting builidings. Then you can easily turn on/off the various layers. No need to see the new building while matching the camera(s). And you can easily change the building in the buildingl scene file and reload it into the site scene. I wouldn't do anything in PS until after rendering (in LW in my case). In PS I usually copy the background and add a black layer mask to it. Then I load the rendered building (with alpha) inbetween that front layer and the background. Then I can just paint on the mask to make foreground parts visible. New renders can easily be slipped into the sandwich. A normal, rectilinear panorama will start to look very strange, stretched and ugly once you pass around 120 degrees fov. Your panoramas are not rectilinear, and they must cover at least 160 degrees fov? You might try with cylindrical projection? Or spherical? Or even some more esoteric like Pannini? What architects usually do when drawing a street block is to draw orthographic, which isn't easy to do with a camera, and in particular not easy when you have lots of tree and other details at different distances from the camera. Take a look at some of my ortho/linear panorama photos at http://www.bknilssen.no/fasader/ . A lot of PS work was involved, and it wouldn't really be possible with your streets I think? But then you could use an orthographic camera in SU, LW or Max. Standard procedure for shooting a normal panorama is to use a tripod with a panorama head that allows you to rotate around the lens' NoParallaxPoint (NPP). Then you could stitch tem using PTgui or some other panorama software where you can choose your projection etc. It depends on the DWGs. If they are very cluttered with lots of small details that I don't need, and makes SU sluggish, I often clean them up inside SU. Then I group different parts and make some new layers where I put them. Next I build a "cage" from plans and elevation drawings and start modelling the building inside that cage. UV mapping and texturing is very easy inside SU, but there are no other projections than planar, and no other parameters than color. It's usually a very good start though

First of all, you're never gonna get any camera matching to work with those panoramas, becasue they have a lot of different vanishing points all over the place. IMO you can't use them at all unless they are better blended. Is this what you got from your client? I use SketchUp and Lightwave BTW. For such a project I would start with a site plan, if available. Model very rough models of the existing buildings in the area. Footprint is most important. I typically make "skyscrapers" even when the buildings are small, because the walls are what I use for aligning. Then either use PhotoMatch in SU, or align by hand, aligning the exisiting walls with the photo. If you have access to the area I would definitely go there and shoot some more photos.

Maybe http://www.cben.net/ ? Or http://www.houseplanz.com/topsites.html ? Or a Google search would probably find some?

If you use SketchUp things are a lot easier using DWG files rather than blueprints/scans Not to mention the precision you get when you can use the dwg references for snapping/inferencing. This is how a scene may look like when modelling from DWG files made into a cage.

Yes, you should definitely get familiar with dwg drawings. At least that's what most architects use here in Norway. You'll probably need to do a lot of cleanup. The very few 3D models I've received are usually a mix of very high res objects (like lots of 50,000 poly faucets, bath tubs, door handles etc, which aren't very relevant for making exterior renderings!) and very low res parts with lots of flipped faces and other problems. You should also expect to get a lot of objects/lines/polys drawn on wrong layers. Expect to get some SketchUp models too. Many of them are very badly made IME. SketchUp works great with DWG files BTW. It is my main modeler for architectural work. My typical workflow is to import DWG files (2D), group/rotate them and make a 3D cage for reference/inference. Next is to build directly on the ground floorplan, using elevations etc for reference/inference/snapping. It is usually much faster than trying to fix a bad 3D model...

The problem is that when/if that "button" comes it won't be in Max, Maya, Lightwave or similar. It will be in Autocad, which the architects already knows and use every day. For SketchUp there is already a Vray plugin, as well as lots of other render plugins. Apart from the building itself, all kinds of furniture and props can be bought/found on the net, hence it really doesn't take that much effort/skills to make a nice render, at least not with an interior. Exteriors requires a lot more props, vegetation, landscaping etc. Another thing is that he 2D architects are slowly being phased out now. New architects will already know how to work in 3D. Our only selling argument in the near future will be that we can do it better

I'm not a Max user, but this question, as well as many similar ones here, really makes me wonder. Is Max really that convoluted that a tutorial is needed for making such simple shapes? Or is it that there are so many ways to do it that it may be difficult to choose? BTW, making such a Moebius strip/ring was one of the very first commercial 3D jobs I had, back in the early 90s, for a CD multimedia encyclopedia. It was a piece of cake to model and animate/bend from a flat strip to Moebius ring using trueSpace 15+ years ago. I would think that 3D software should have gone a long way since then? It certainly would be very easy to make in Lightwave nowadays. Or in SketchUp for that matter...

I think the model looks pretty good, but the last image was too dark IMO. But no monitor, no matter how well calibrated, will ever help you get rid of those horrible repeating 2D bushes in front of the pool. You really need to do something with them. Is the lawn supposed to be "squared" like that? Looks like lights in the ground?

The model looks very nice! But why do you need all that depth blur, particularly on the second image? If photographed with a high end view/studio camera they would most likely have tilted the lens/focal plane to avoid such DOF anyway;)

Some of the architects are artists, and some are not. It's like having ink and watercolors doesn't automatically make you a good architectural illustrator. "My" architects never draw any other furniture etc than what's available in the symbol library, but a good rendering requires some work on such "details". Lighting is another area where they may not be able to do the job themselves. If you look at what is being used here on this forum it looks like 99% are using Max/Vray (I'm not However, I'm afraid that the dreaded "Make a nice picture" button is approaching faster every day now...