sketchup

[ad7venture]

Just started using Sketchup and I'm really impressed with it.  This is the start of a house I'm doing for an upcoming game:


It's actually a cad program so everything is done to scale and I'm building off a blueprint of the first floor of an old house.  It's going to be a 3d game so I find myself in the position of building my first scale house.  I've always built just rooms before. 

[Trumgottist]

Interesting floorplan.

[ad7venture]

Yeah, I love old houses.  I don't even know what the outside looks like and I made a few changes, but there's a central fireplace, and a walk in pantry.  It will have a second story, an attic, and a basement.

[Igor Hardy]

I've been also playing with sketchup, but only to create mockups, experiment with angles. Unfortunately, it works very slow on my system, so it didn't turn out as efficient as I would hope.

Nevertheless very useful for such an untrained graphic artist as myself.

[ad7venture]

Check under Window/preferences/OpenGL   
and make sure hardware acceleration is checked.  Mine wasn't by default.
I don't know if you've been through the tutorials, but it's really amazing how intuitive it is.  I find myself using it more and more and it gets easier and easier to do what I want.  Besides the google tutorials, there are a lot of other tutorials on youtube which I mainly just watch once in a while so I know what it's capable of doing.  You can build a stairway in a matter of minutes, probably less if you get good at it.  As a free form modeler, I don't think it's that good, but for architecture, it's amazing.
There are a lot of plugins for it also.  I've barely scratched the surface on those. 

[Igor Hardy]

Thanks for the tip - it works much faster now, although the shift hotkey started hanging up everything, so I must remember to avoid it.

Yes, I was very impressed by the possibilities the program gives, and I even heard that big budget games like Uncharted made some use of it. But then I started recommending it to some people I know that use CAD software for their work - architects and engineers. They all were largely unimpressed saying that all those features I'm excited about are pretty basic stuff in any CAD program.

[ad7venture]

I saw the video where the guy talked about using it for uncharted, mainly as a design tool.  I'm sure expensive CAD programs test for surfaces and points and have fast ways of doing a lot of things.  The only difference would be that Sketchup is simpler and uses fewer tools.  It's more directed at common people than professionals, I think.  Those programs are very expensive and generally a little heavyweight for an average user.  You're not going to be up and running on those programs in a matter of hours.  Blender doesn't do any of it.  It does a lot of cool stuff, but different. Some of it is even easier, for instance mirroring is a lot easier in Blender and you do it while you are working on models, not after you are finished.  I think they complement fairly well, although the importer for .dae files crashes and I think it's Sketchup's fault.  I have to use an alternate exporter.

[nigec]

Yep sketchup rocks! first glance it looks abit primitive, given time and its as good as any other CAD or modeling program.
This is my fav pic I did in SU over a year ago

[nigec]

BTW, import to desktop  rather than into Sketchup if your using the warehouse, there seems to be a bug, it was ok with SU7

[Igor Hardy]

Wow - that pic is very impressive, nigec! Was it doctored to look good for that particular pic, or did it look just as great from any angle?

btw There's a thread on bigbluecup forums recommenging a whole sketchup based pipeline:

http://www.bigbluecup.com/yabb/index.php?topic=43088.0

[nigec]

100% modeled in SU, 90% of the mats were applied in Sketchup, then it was rendered in Kerkythea's commercial brother, Thea, all I did in Thea was bump maps, lights, shiny metals and the light effect, which Kerkythea can do as well.
But the AGS forum's advice is solid, Kerkythea is an awesome free renderer, there's a plugin for Sketchup which will give a nice image without really trying, I would recommend it, and it works with the free Sketchup
This picture was Kerkythea rendered:
http://arfur9.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=24#/d2m039f

[ad7venture]

That's looking great Nige!  I actually know how some of it was done in the short time I've played around with SU.  That follow-me tool is pretty cool.  I think I'll do most of my character work in Blender yet, but I really like it for architecture.