Use a Raytracing Renderer to Make Photorealistic Images

Once you’ve modeled something in Sketchup, it’s hard to resist the temptation to show it off to anyone who’ll look. But even with a wealth of style and lighting options, it’s hard to really make an object in Sketchup look great, or anywhere near photorealistic. Fortunately, there are 3rd party renderers that make up for this deficit.

For a free option, you can try Kerkythea. It's a freeware renderer with a Sketchup plugin available and can put together some pretty decent renders. For more information about how to setup and use Kerkythea with Sketchup, check out this blog post.

Image By: Alex

If you’re ready to move onto something a little bit more powerful, there are some relatively affordable renderers available, such as SU Podium, which has a free evaluation, and sells for $180. Unlike the previous renderer, SU Podium works directly within Sketchup, so you don’t have to start up a separate program, then export and import a sketchup model to make a quality render.

Image By: Evil Elvis

Of course there are also more advanced, general purpose renderers such as V-Ray that can be used to make photo-realistic images of your models, but these carry an industrial-strength price tag, sometimes running into the thousands of dollars.

Image By: tranganhhp

Make a Left 4 Dead Level!

For a lot of computer users, their first experience with 3D modeling was in building levels for one of the classic 3D shooters, like Quake. In terms of sheer fun value and sense of accomplishment, it’s hard to do better than getting to run around and gun down your friends in your newly created model. While Sketchup was not originally meant for making game levels, Google’s been making efforts to move in the direction, starting with a plugin that allows you to use Sketchup to make levels for Hammer—the level editor that powers Source engine games like Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress.

Making a Left 4 Dead level in Sketchup is a pretty simple affair with the Hammer Sketchup plugin. First, install the plugin by downloading the Left 4 Dead Authoring tools in Steam (requires a purchased copy of Left 4 Dead) and finding the plugin in \Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead\sdk_tools\plugins. Extract all files in the plugins folder to Sketchup’s plugin directory. Once you’ve done that, two new items will be in the “Plugins” menu next time you start: Export SMD and Export VMF.

By allowing you to export as VMF, the Hammer plugin lets you to save your Sketchup models in a format that the Left 4 Dead version of the Hammer level editor understands. This means you can use Sketchup to quickly model props for Left 4 Dead models, or even entire level geometries, then use the Hammer editor to add the finishing touches, like scripting and AI pathing.

A word of warning: the Hammer editor is finicky, and this affects how you have to model in Sketchup. The primary concern is that Hammer requires that all brushes(objects to be placed in the level) have a convex topography, which is means no straight line can intersect a brush at more than two points. This means that any components you wish to use must be composed of simple, convex blocks, which themselves have to be made into components (by selecting them and pressing G in Sketchup). This can be a tricky process, so if you want to learn more, check out this link and keep your eyes on MaximumPC.com—we plan to offer a more detailed guide to Sketchup and Hammer in the future.

Build a Model of Your House from a Floorplan

There’s something oddly rewarding about seeing a tiny version of your house. And beyond just the “Oh, neat!” value of seeing your living quarters in miniature, there’s real utility in being able to rearrange your furniture and try out different wall- and floor-coverings without actually having to do any heavy lifting. Fortunately, with Sketchup it’s surprisingly easy to make a model of a building interior. To do so is essentially a three step process:

1)    Obtain a floorplan of the building. If you live in a rented property, you might be able to ask your landlord for a floorplan, or you can simply take measurements of your rooms and draw your own floorplan in your preferred graphics program.

2)    Make a 2D replica of the floorplan in Sketchup. This step is easier than you might imagine. Simply click File > Import to import the image of your floorplan into Sketchup, and place it flat. Then, using the Rectangle, Line, and Offset tool, trace over the walls, drawing directly onto the floorplan. When you’re done, make sure to delete any extraneous lines.

3)    Finally, use the “Push/Pull” tool to extrude the walls you’ve drawn up. Click the surface, and type “10’” and press enter to manually select a height of 10 feet for the walls. Next, to make doors, simply draw a rectangle on the wall where the door should be, and use the “Push/Pull” tool to push the door through the wall, making a hole. You can copy/paste the door-shaped rectangle around the house, so you don’t have to individually draw each door. Repeat the same process for windows.

And that’s it! Now you’ve got a model of your house, ready to be furnished.

If you’d like more in-depth instructions about how to do this, Google has an excellent video tutorial here.

Modeling a Room in 3D with Google SketchUp

It is now free to download and use a high quality 3D modeling software application. Just visit Google’s new 3D modeling center: http://sketchup.google.com/
The drawing above is a scale model of the control room at Indecent Music with one monitor, sans equipment and furniture. Measuring the SPLs in a room and using a model like this helps you to interpret the data you get from your SPL. It also helps you to see how sound might be reflecting in your room. The walls and other surfaces are easy to understand in 3D.
A floor plan view or a horizontal slice lets you write in data points to make the a data model.


It’s pretty easy to see how this kind of a tool could make working in your room easy and and more scientific.
The other thing that I love about SketchUp is that it has a built in tool to get models from Google 3D Warehouse and to upload your own models to share with others. This allows for both online collaboration with colleagues and for collabs with people you don’t know. One of the things that makes 3D modeling so painful, is the need to recreate all of the models that you need to use yourself. Most people end up buying a library of components for use with their own industries. For instance, Kitchen Designers use a variety of different CAD applications to design kitchens, but who wants to model 2300 variants of a Kraftmaid cabinet? So you buy the models from the source.
With the 3D Warehouse, you can check to see if anyone has made something similar already that you can reuse or recycle. Extremely useful. As long as everyone shares, this kind of system works very, very well. Did you notice the model of the monitor? That model was downloaded and imported straight from the 3D Warehouse.

credits: stuDIY.