Today I came across a great idea on Google+: Use coins as flooring - preferably one cent pieces (that are even taken out of circulation in some places). With a bit of resin on top, this ingenious flooring solution adds sparkle and a wonderful warm glow to a room.
While adding this to a real floor should be pretty labor intensive, as it turns out, creating a texture for rendering proved quite easy. You can grab the diffuse texture as well as the bump map from my flickr pages by clicking on the images below and then use them in your own projects.
And here are the material settings for Twilight Renderer:
The texture repeats a bit, so make sure you adjust its rotation a bit to remove that effect. Also, you might want to add the bump texture into the reflection channel to only have the pennies reflect....
I just published a page (under the book companion pages) called "Freebies" where I am giving stuff away!
At this point, this page features texture images and spherical environments, which you can use for your SketchUp renderings. All of them are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Therefore, feel free to use any of them in your (personal and commercial) projects.
Although the environments are only LDR (not HDR) and most textures don't tile, they can be very useful as the rendering above this text shows.
Keep checking the Freebies page (or my Flickr sets) often as I will be adding material regularly....
I just posted a quick description of Sketchfab's new interactive WebGL material editor on my personal blog. You can find the post here:
http://www.alexschreyer.net/cad/improve-your-webgl-models-on-sketchfab-with-the-new-material-editor/
Even if you don't use Sketchfab to publish your 3D models, it is actually quite useful to just upload a generic model and experiment with the material editor's parameters. These are the same parameters that come up when you work in a rendering software's material editor. Using Sketchfab's editor, you can interactively change them and see what happens....
Happy New Year everyone!!!
Now that my Christmas / Holiday Card is "so last year", it is time to reveal how it was made. For a tutorial (that also includes the Ruby script I used for it), go to the SketchUcation.com website. You can find the tutorial there.
http://sketchucation.com/resources/tutorials/48-advanced/306-scripting-a-christmas-card-with-ruby...
