Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Architectural Design with SketchUp
5. Turn off the topmost layer, which is the image of the person that will be visible in the end.
6. On the second layer, color the shape completely black.
7. Select the shape and stretch it until its perspective makes it appear as the person’s shadow.
8. Apply a Gaussian blur filter to this layer. Go with a light blur for this one.
9. Copy this layer and apply Gaussian blur again—this time with a higher degree of blurring.
10. If you want a shadow that appears less fuzzy next to the person yet blurs farther away,
apply a layer mask as shown in Figure 5.84 to the two shadow layers.
11. Make the person’s image visible again and place it on top. It should now look correct in
the rendering.
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Plants, Trees, Grass, Rocks, and Carpet
It is easily possible for computer-generated geometry (be it the model of a house, a landscape,
or simply an object) to look artificial. In our SketchUp models, edges are always straight
and most lines are parallel to one of the three main axes. As you know, nature doesn’t look
like that. When you stand in front of your house, you will see not just the straight lines of
the facade but also a tree, a bush, some grass, some dirt, and other “natural fuzziness.”
It is therefore important—even if landscape elements are not your main focus—to include
them in order to add realism. This is, of course, even more important when you focus solely
on the landscape and need to not only show vegetation but also consider species, growing
season, and so on.
While this is very important for exterior scenes, interior scenes often benefit from adding
plants as well. From a rendering perspective, adding a shag carpet and some fabrics (drapes
or bedsheets) serves a similar purpose. Chapter 4 showed you how to use the Fur plugin to
create a carpet. We therefore focus on vegetation in this section.
2D versus 3D versus Photoshop
When we want to add landscape objects such as plants to a scene, we face the same question
that we did with people: Should we include complete 3D models in our scene? Can
we get away with 2D (face-me) images? Or should we add them in postproduction (using
Photoshop or any other image-editing software)?
As before, this often depends on various parameters—in this case, the most important is
how close an object is to the viewer. The closer the object is to the camera, the more detail
is visible and the more modeling might be necessary to include that detail.
Another aspect to consider in our model is polygon count. Natural objects are always
crooked, random, edgy, or at least bent (imagine a blade of grass). Modeling this in detail
often requires many polygons to make these objects look realistic. We might be able to use
fewer polygons and add detail using a texture, but that is not always possible.
In general, follow these recommendations:
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Object is close to the camera—Model as much as necessary. You might be able to
model only one side of the object (e.g., the front side of a wall). Use as few polygons as
possible and try to add randomness by using a texture. Prefer a single-image texture rather
than a tiling image (tiled images often create patterns that can easily be spotted up close).