PhotoReal Rendering
This chapter is mostly concerned with applying materials and textures for photo-real rendering with Kerkythea or other rendering software, or for output directly from SketchUp. If you're aiming for artistic styles such as pencil or watercolor, it is often better to use an untextured model, so skip this chapter for now and go to Chapter 6, Entourage the SketchUp Way.
We're now going to work through the various texturing processes together. Texturing is a simple process of applying the techniques mentioned in this chapter (and what you've learned already), piece by piece to your scene. You'll set up great looking textures one by one until your whole scene looks like the real thing.
In this chapter, you will learn about:
♦ When and why to use textures
♦ The process overview chart
♦ Using SketchUp's own textures
♦ Extracting great textures from your own photos
♦ Using photo-match to generate real life textures
♦ How to create seamless tiling textures
♦ Applying, manipulating, scaling, and editing materials
♦ Creating, storing, and sharing custom material libraries
♦ Image formats, size, and compression
♦ Tweaking textured models for realism using GIMP
The methods you're going to learn are fun, quick, effective, and at the same time, possibly the most robust and versatile. These methods have been made possible because Google is so committed to modeling the whole world in 3D for Google Earth, that they have focused on making SketchUp the best in the world in quick building creation and texturing. Again, don't think that just because it's free (or cheap for the Pro version) it's not as good as other applications; it's better.
But first, should we be texturing at all?
Post a comment