Something I've been curious about....

[Greyfish]

Hello all, I've been checking this site out for awhile but never posted. Very nice forum.

 

Anyway, I guess I'd call myself somewhat of a novice now that I'm coming over from

CAD and Revit side of things but I have a question: How many CGArchitects use

Sketchup to create their overall buildings? Is it easier and more efficient to do it in

sketchup and bring into the 3DS Max environment? The accuracy of max really gets

to me and if SU is better in that regard I'm all for it. Also, hows the learning curve?

How much time does someone need to invest to be able to build quality arch models?

 

Thanks in advance.

[RayOfLight]

take a few hours and you can do almost everything with SU. Take a week of practice and you can make nice buildings.

But I personally prefer modelling in 3dsMax or Modo, mostly because that is more accurate (or easier for me).

 

What is the problem with the 3dsMax accuracy?

[Greyfish]

Sorry took so long for a reply, I was FINALLY able to land some side CAD work so I had to jump on

that. My issue w/ Max is trying to draw a wall in a straight line. I have 2009 so maybe

they've fixed it. Also, unless I'm missing something (which is quite possible) trying to grad a vertex

and acturally snapping it to something isn't as smooth as I think it should be. I have to stay on the

transform icon to keep it in the right plane and can't grab the actual vertex itself.

 

I'm thinking about just avoiding it and doing my models in Revit, which I'm familier w/.

Maybe the surrounding area of my model (low-res buildings next door w/ bland materiels

so the object of the rendering would stand out, etc.) would be easier.

 

Just read a scathing review of sketchup in another thread in this section. Thoughts?

[dbrenders]

i think sketchup is faster , no doubt you can have a model in just hours, but i think that if you want a very organic shape or special thing it's better to do with max or rhino, altough you can get it too in sketchup and some good plugins as artisan, curviloft, etc. But if you are talking about, flexibility, and speed, no doubt use SKetup

[M V]

I use SketchUp for just about everything. I model, render with V-Ray, design, animation work, I have even used it to plan 2D PDFs through Layout. It is by far the best tool I have ever come across.

[xEndlessxUrbiax]

I use Sketchup for modeling usually after importing the AutoCAD files of the building I am working on. Sketchup is incredibly fast as is really easy to use. There are tons of plugins available which make modeling anything pretty easy. I find the importing to 3dsMax option really useful and I do all my renderings in 3dsMax. It took me a while to hone in on the best method of modeling/importing/assigning materials for my own personal work flow. I work in an architecture firm and do a lot of AutoCAD work and will very often take those files into Sketchup and within 2 days I can produce a high quality rendering to show a client.

[marcelo fernandes]

Hi. Well, let me share my opinion with you.

 

I think that there is no chance any other program is as fast and productive as Sketchup. At the beginning, I was very skeptic about it, considering it a program for amateurs; for people who weren't able to use any other 3d software. And because I always saw newbies doing crappy models in SU with no kind of structure, logic or planning, I thought it was the software's fault.

Well, it was not.

 

In an architecture office such as where i work, it is important that your models are always ready to be changed and for that, we need good planning, structure and modelling, otherwise forget it.

 

Sketchup's correct use of OUTLINER, GROUPS and COMPONENTS is an unbelievable time-saving process. Compared to Autocad's bureaucratic and difficult blocks or to Max's non-architectural-friendlyness , SU is really the way to go.

 

When I made the step from modelling in Autocad to Sketchup, my productivity increased 5 times (why I chose the number 5? No clue...). Trust me.

 

There are some drawback, though:

- SU doesn't think round things as vectors, so forget about complex shapes. You're better off in Rhino or 3ds for that matter.

- As for renderings, SU+Vray1.5 is absolutely ridiculous compared with 3ds+vray2.0, although you will want to use it once in a while if you will be constantly updating your model and want to skip the good old "change-export-import-reassign mats and uvw's" bollocks.

 

Check this out. We were talking about that in a different post, the other day.

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/72014-sketchup-3dsmax-vray-need-help.html

 

Hope my answer was of any help.

[M V]

SketchUp is as good as you take it. I have seen models from other people and they are just awful. No groups, non cutting components, lack of detail, etc. If someone knows what they are doing and using the plugins available to them, you can model and render just about anything. Where the limitations are lie in high poly geometry. This is where SketchUp fails. If you want HQ trees and access to things like ForestPro, then you will want to go over to Max. It's not an uncommon workflow to model in SU, bring it over to Max to add the hi-poly stuff and render.