Watercolor filter or sketchy filter??

[dohm0022]

My firm uses sketchup for almost every architectural project we work on. It is great as an inhouse tool, but we find that when we show the model/renderings to clients they are a little cold and hard lined. Does anyone out there in thread land have any saved actions in Photoshop that produce a decent watercolor or sketchy quality? I have used some of the standard filters in photoshop, but they never look authentic. See http://www.matthewvalero.com for something more we are after, but not as tiled. Any help would be great thanks.

[Tommy L]

I havnt seen Matthew Valero before, but his watertcolour work is alot better than his digital stuff. The tiling you are seeing in the images is more because of tiling in the render than the post-process.

If you do a search for npr or watercolour or paint effect on this forum you should find plenty of advice.

[AJLynn]

I'd recommend a few things:

 

-Sketchup 6 styles - you can save styles with different stroke, shadow, fill, etc. options. You can also use this functionality to generate a few differently styled graphics of the same shot for use in...

 

-Photoshop compositing, not just filters. You see these techniques used all the time in fully rendered work, and they're discussed in some Gnomon Workshop DVDs and in one of the 3DFluff DVDs for Cinema4D rendering, but there's no reason no to apply similar ideas to Sketchup work. Generate separate image files for hidden line, shaded without line, shadow and all white faces with no line (shadow only), textured with no line, individual objects you want to highlight with others hidden, etc. Then you can use these together in a layered Photoshop file with layer multiply, do filters on only certain layers (e.g., brush stroke filter the shaded and cross hatch the shadow but leave the linework alone). You can also get paper textures in that way.

[bwsumruld]

I have posted a tutorial of a technique that i have been using for a few months now. I hope this will help!

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/21991-sketchup-photoshop-renderings.html#post151829

[bytor]

William,

 

Go to the Sketchup Forums site and do a search under the gallery listing for "watercolor". You should find several different techniques outlined. The best in my opinion is from this guy http://www.rapidillustrations.com/ who frequently submits work and has posted his process in the group.

 

HTH.................Bytor