Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Architectural Design with SketchUp
aspect ratios. If you use SketchUp’s materials to texture it, you will likely get a result similar
to the one shown in the middle image of Figure 5.79—a jumbled mess of texture orientations.
You could manually position the texture of every single face, but this is not practical.
Figure 5.79: Texturing a sphere (left: sphere showing hidden faces; middle: default mapping in SketchUp;
right: spherical mapping using UV Tools plugin
Fortunately for us, there is another plugin that can help out here. UV Tools by Whaat (Dale
Martens) provides spherical and cylindrical mapping. All you need to do is select all faces on
the sphere and right-click on one of them. The context menu then offers you both mapping
options. If desired, you could now also adjust texture size in SketchUp’s Materials window.
Objects
As you can imagine, a rendering of a kitchen looks quite sterile and uninhabited if there are no
objects (e.g., a vase, a plate with fruit, a wine bottle) on the countertops. Likewise, an external
rendering of a building looks artificial unless there are a certain number of realistic-looking
plants and exterior objects in the scene. Including people in a rendering often lends the scene
realism and scale and gives viewers an intuitive way of imagining themselves in the environment.
As you can see in these examples, objects and entourage (defined in the widest sense)
are important for our renderings. So how do we include them?
In general, there are two methods, each with its respective advantages:
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Include in the rendering process—This involves getting 3D or 2D models into SketchUp
(or your rendering software) and placing them in the scene. While this seems to be the
most intuitive method, it might be labor intensive to find or create a particular custom
component you are after. Also, depending on the complexity (and number) of the objects,
they might lead to an increase in rendering time. On the positive side, this method results
in consistent renderings if several perspectives of the same scene are created.
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