Creating Photo Textures for Rendering

Creating Photo Textures for Rendering

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
As you just saw in the CLT example, having a good texture makes all the difference when you create renderings in SketchUp. I also discussed this in some length in the book (especially in the rendering chapter). To expand on this topic, here are some tips for two cases: Making a Seamless Texture Obviously a seamlessly repeating (a "tiling") texture is the most efficient way to go when you use textures. This allows you to use a small image to fill a large space. And if you use a good texture, you won't even see any seams or repeating patterns. As I described in the book, there are many places where you can get good quality tiling textures. Steps What do you do when you need to make your own? First of all, start with a good image! This typically requires a few simple but important steps: Find the texture you are looking for (a brick wall, grass etc.). Be careful with the sun's position....
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Need a Cross-Laminated Timber in SketchUp?

Need a Cross-Laminated Timber in SketchUp?

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
Rendering of the newly-textured CLTs With Cross-Laminated Timber (often abbreviated to CLT) available now as a new and exciting building material, I am sure some of you will need to include these in your SketchUp models, too. To help you out a bit, I am making SketchUp components of 3-ply and 5-ply CLT panels available. You can download them from my 3D Warehouse account (you can just search for "CLT" in the Components window in SketchUp). Models and Textures Click on the links below to preview and access them. I am making these available under a Creative Commons Attribution License. If you need the raw textures for your own creations, you can download these images from my Flickr account here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexschreyer/8892850629/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexschreyer/8892850691 These are from my textures set....
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Create a Penny Floor with this Texture

Create a Penny Floor with this Texture

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
Rendering of the penny floor 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. Coin floor texture Bumpmap for texture 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....
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Free materials and environments available

Free materials and environments available

by Alex Schreyer2 Comments
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....
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