Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Architectural Design with SketchUp
To add people (or animals, for that matter) to your scenes, you can take any or all of
these approaches:
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Add 3D people to the scene. These are complete 3D models of people—sometimes
even with realistic-looking textures. The 3D Warehouse is a great resource for these kinds
of models, but there are also other (sometimes commercial) distributors.
The main benefit of using 3D models is that once you have “staged” a scene with people,
you can create as many realistic-looking renderings from various perspectives as you need.
A potential downside of this approach is that some of the models are composed of many
polygons and may slow down rendering—especially if you use lots of people in your scene.
Use 2D people shapes or cutouts. SketchUp allows components to be set up so that
they always face the camera. This is very convenient (e.g., you need only a 2D photo to
represent a tree from various perspectives), but it results in the people in your scene always
facing the viewer—no matter the vantage point from which the viewer looks at them.
You can find many 2D people in the 3D Warehouse. Some are created from photographs
and therefore look very realistic. Others are “sketchy” people who look better in sketchy
non-photorealistic renderings.
In terms of rendering speed, these will render faster than true 3D objects. This is true
especially if the rendering software allows for transparent image maps (e.g., using a PNG
image with transparency) and the object has only a few polygons.
Add people as 2D cutouts in your image-editing software. If you are comfortable
using image-editing software such as Photoshop, then you can learn to place people cutouts
realistically into any image. While this may require picking appropriate photos and
some postprocessing work on shadows and layering (e.g., when a person stands behind
a plant), this approach is very efficient. Because people aren’t being added to the rendered
scene, they don’t add any additional time to the rendering itself.
A downside of this approach is that it is not very usable when various perspectives of
the same scene need to be rendered and the people need to appear consistent in the
different perspectives.
Figure 5.82 illustrates some of the people models that you can download from the 3D
Warehouse (from left to right): sketchy 2D, silhouette 2D, photo-cutout 2D (model by TaffGoch),
sketchy (untextured) 3D, and photorealistic 3D (model by Reallusion iClone).
Figure 5.83 shows how the three main types—2D follow-me, textured 3D, Photoshopadded
image cutout—behave when two views of the same scene are being rendered. As
you can see, the only one that looks appropriate in both views is the 3D model of the person
in the middle. The left figure renders facing the camera independent of the viewer’s location,
which is convenient but may not be desired. The figure on the right works only in the
top image because for the bottom image a different photograph (one taken from behind)
would have to be available.
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