rendering

adding wall art in SketchUp Band Render 005

This last post in the series was a bit of an afterthought – I hadn’t thought to include anything about picture frames. But it seemed  a fitting way to wrap up this series, to add a more realistic look to your wall art. I have a specific way I like to do my frames, which […]

adding wall art SketchUp Posters 21

In Part 1 of this series, I showed how to use an imported image to create a wall poster or painting. In Part 2 I showed how to adjust the component so that it will align to any wall. In this post, I’ll show what I consider to be the best way to model art elements: […]

adding wall art SketchUp Posters 14

Here’s where I left off after Part 1 of this series – a room with one painting (so far), brought in as an image and made into an aligned component. But as we’ll see, the default alignment assigned by SketchUp won’t work the way we want.   What’s the Alignment Problem? Let’s say I want to move […]

SketchUp Wall Art: Part 1 - Import Image

Look at this lovely, sun-filled room (rendered from SketchUp by the free Twilight Hobby rendering extension: It’s missing something, right? How about a couple of fun paintings or posters on the walls:   It’s pretty easy to bring images into SketchUp, to use as textures or stand-alone images. But there are also correct and incorrect […]

Skatter Extension: Part 2 - Realistic Trees and Rendering

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced Skatter, the amazing extension that allows you to mass-place objects onto surfaces. Specifically, with Skatter you can create detailed, vast forest plantings, lawns, and similar vegetation patterns. In this post, I’ll show a quick demo of using Skatter to generate a quick mass vegetation planting for a bridge […]

Community Center Rendering FINAL small

Before you ask, no – this is not an interview with this guy:   I met Ryan Seacrist when he attended one of my classes. During one of the tutorials, Ryan came up with a different approach to getting 3D modeling work completed faster. I was impressed and have kept in touch with him. Ryan has a […]

sketchup graphics and styles Vineyard Styles Model

If you missed Part 1 of this series, I went over the basics of how to change your model’s style. This post goes a little deeper, showing a few dos and don’ts. Pro Style Tips It’s rather fun to open SketchUp‘s Styles window and try out everything you see, to play with different face colors, backgrounds, watermarks, background […]

SketchUp Styles: Part 1 - Customize Your Look

One of SketchUp’s best features is styles, giving you the ability to produce excellent graphic images and non-photorealistic (NPR) renderings. I almost always use SketchUp’s native graphic styles for client presentations, though I do have to produce “fancy” renderings from time to time (these days I’m into Lumion). For a basic presentation, just turn on […]

SketchUp Extensions: Five Reasons to Use Them

Extensions for SketchUp are amazing. I remember using my first SketchUp extensions when third-party add-ons were just introduced, way back in the SketchUp 4 days. SketchUp was still a start-up at the time (anyone remember @Last software?). And in those days, you had to install extensions via a cumbersome, somewhat geeky process requiring some coding […]