TIEBIAOJI SketchUp Tutorials

At which stage do I introduce entourage

• What is Meridian Tapping and How Can It Help

There are three options here, illustrated in the first column of this table:

Broadly speaking, the level of difficulty experienced with entourage will increase the further along the process you decide to introduce it. So, as already discussed in Chapter 3, Composing the Scene, it is best to set up entourage place markers at least in SketchUp right at the start. The disadvantage of introducing detailed entourage (high polygon, detailed textures) into SketchUp is that it tends to slow the program down to a snail's pace. The way to get round this is discussed in this chapter when we look at swapping high/low detail entourage.

Many visualization artists leave entourage to the last moment, introducing it in the postprocessing stage in Photoshop or GIMP. The reason for this is that it used to be difficult to set up 2D billboard style entourage in modeling or CAD software. That's not the case now with SketchUp. So, there's really no need to learn all the skills required to do this successfully in Photoshop. If you already have the skills and a library of images, you might still like to do it this way.

What I suggest is to introduce entourage in SketchUp and at the rendering software stage. The two work so seamlessly together that you will be able to keep both programs open, using the best features of each to populate your scene. While most entourage can be introduced in SketchUp, extra file formats can be imported into Kerkythea that are not supported by SketchUp, such as the popular .obj format.