When it comes to rendering software, there are many options available nowadays, but Kerkythea is one of the oldest free software packages that is still available for this task. It isn't as easy to use as other rendering software, but it still works reasonably well and produces good results. Check out this video for an introduction.
Tutorial Video
https://youtu.be/0_zlnrBHf1E
This is a free sample instructional video from the book "Architectural Design with SketchUp: 3D Modeling, Extensions, BIM, Rendering, Making, and Scripting" (2nd Edition). I discuss this topic more in detail in that book's Chapter 2.
Want more of these videos? If you own the book, use the password from the inside cover to gain access to all of my remaining videos on Wiley's website: http://www.wiley.com/go/schreyer2e. If you don't yet have your own copy, follow the links in the sidebar to get one. It is a great reference for SketchUp!
...
At least when it comes to creating realistic-looking vegetation in SketchUp, it is important to be able to randomly place, scale, and rotate objects. Nothing looks worse than a "sterile" copied/pasted row of trees, for example. Of course, this applies to other objects as well, like e.g. a shag carpet or fur. Let's fix this with today's code snippet.
Random grass in a randomized landscape
Typically, the objects to be placed would come in the form of components (trees, grass, bushes, as in the image above). And those then need to be placed somewhat randomly on one or more faces in your model. A good example for that is a lawn, as I discussed in Chapter 5 in my book. As I mention in Chapter 4, there are of course several extensions available that let you accomplish this task. However, as it turns out, we can re-use two pieces of example code from Chapter 7 and do this with just a few...
Dear friends and colleagues,
I wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas, a peaceful and joyous holiday season and a healthy, happy, and successful new year 2020!
Cheers,
Alex
P.S. Once again my card is a SketchUp model, this time with a wood-block print theme. Rendering was again accomplished in Sketchfab. In case you want to play with the original model, here it is:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/xmas2019-5385a758e8ab447bad301f7236c68ce5
...
https://sketchfab.com/models/ffc984f2997a42c884d0a7425dca0955
Dear friends and colleagues,
I wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas, a peaceful and joyous holiday season and a happy and successful new year 2019!
Cheers,
Alex
P.S. Once again my Christmas card is a simple SketchUp model, made with a randomizing script and the amazing MS Physics extension. It was then exported to Sketchfab where I enhanced all textures a bit and applied lighting....
A rendering of the candle holder
Now that the days are getting shorter, it may be a nice home decorating idea to create a decorative candle holder. Having the powers of SketchUp and computational design methods as well as 3D printing at our fingertips, it does, of course, make sense to create something more interesting than just a boring lampshade.
This brief example uses the patterned panel exercise from Chapter 7 to create the basic geometry. Of course you can replace the sinusoidal wave pattern easily now with another beautiful function, or you could even have the cutout pattern generated based on colors in an image, which allows you to make it look like a logo, landscape, etc.
Since the resulting shape needed to have the pattern cut into a curved surface, there were basically two approaches: 1) create a curved surface and place the geometry onto it by arranging it radially (and then subtracting it), or 2) creating the panels flat and...
