Thread: Sketchup City

Wow. I can't imagine the amount of time it took you to create this. The Renders look amazing. Have you checked out LumenRT? They are the same company that did the vegetation rendering for Avatar and pirates of the carribean. You can create a 3d fly through with it, it's pretty impressive. Good job!

Excellent, looks like a lot of work and a lot of fun at the same time.

Sketch up huh? That's impressive have some rep for that!!

Thanks everyone for the kind words and encouragement!

Originally Posted by dhutchinson728

Your map looks really nice, although it would be great for other people to be able to use your map in their games. Perhaps if it could be larger (for the first on the posts. The later images are truly wonderful too look at. Have you passed on your suggestions to the creators of the software you used. Perhaps with your feedback, you could help them develop better tools as well.

Thanks! I can composite an image that shows things in good detail, and that'd be a fairly large image. Guess I'll need to figure out what hosting file size limits are these days. If that works out, I'll make an image and link it here.

I haven't corresponded with software developers, but I'd be happy to.

Originally Posted by MSketcher

Wow. I can't imagine the amount of time it took you to create this. The Renders look amazing. Have you checked out LumenRT? They are the same company that did the vegetation rendering for Avatar and pirates of the carribean. You can create a 3d fly through with it, it's pretty impressive. Good job!

Thanks, and you're right, those renders are great! Nice & atmospheric. I'd have liked to have made more use of render integrated with Sketchup for this project, because it's such a good idea. Pursuing that in the future will definitely be a goal.

This is bloddy hell awesome! I wish I could do that. Long time I wanted to be able to do cities for my SciFi comic but never got the grip with sketchup, but saw some awesome works with it. Is there a possibility that you do a tutorial (or a series of such) on how to build houses and texture them and compose them to such great images? I fell realy awkward with 3D.....

Really nice!

Btw, how do you put textures on the models in Sketchup?

Very nice job

Hi guys, thanks for the comments!

I have been working on a panorama of my project. Bryce has limitations on the maximum size I can render, so I am breaking it down as multiple panels of 1500x1500 pixels to make the work manageable. Attached is a sample panel.

Originally Posted by Schwarzkreuz

This is bloddy hell awesome! I wish I could do that. Long time I wanted to be able to do cities for my SciFi comic but never got the grip with sketchup, but saw some awesome works with it. Is there a possibility that you do a tutorial (or a series of such) on how to build houses and texture them and compose them to such great images? I fell realy awkward with 3D.....

Thanks for the kind words! I gotta say, I'm just an amateur who has figured some stuff out with some free software. I'm not opposed to the idea of writing a tutorial, but perhaps at some future date when I feel I have a more thorough grasp of the subject. For now I think my comfort level is more along the lines of the notes I've included in this thread, or answering questions where I feel I have a decent answer.

Originally Posted by anders_vb

Btw, how do you put textures on the models in Sketchup?

Hi Anders, I textured my models in Sketchup the usual way, via the Paintbucket tool. I used default textures. These might be useful, links to some tutorials (including a YouTube video) that cover aspects of texturing in Sketchup.

Adding detail to your model
Adding detail to your model - SketchUp Help

Paint Bucket Tool: Applying materials
Paint Bucket Tool: Applying materials - SketchUp Help

How to apply and edit materials in Google SketchUp
How to apply and edit materials in Google SketchUp - YouTube

My texturing in Sketchup was very casual, since my project called for exporting the model from Sketchup, and importing it into Bryce. Since the textures don't import into Bryce from Sketchup. I used textures in Sketchup pretty much just as a visual aid to help me package my exports so they'd be convenient to texture once they imported into Bryce.

On the other hand, if I had used a 3D renderer that integrated with Sketchup, I might have been able to do all the texturing within Sketchup, which would have been a much simpler process.