Friendlyskies AoI Forum

Absolutely stunning!  *shakes head in amazement*  I'm in awe!

Thanks for sharing.

Art

Wow, those are some excellent renders! The textures are done really well...I like the floor a lot. The .obj export from Sketchup seems to work well too.

The concept of rendering in passes like you did seems pretty smart too. Thanks for sharing!

unbeleivable, some guys in my tech graph class got sketchup. i dont like how it works personally. looks like its capable of more than i thought. seems to have a lot of gliches though.
great work

Wow!

Thanks for all the friendly responses. I really appreciate all of the compliments. In turn:

Fencepost: Thank you!

peteihis: Thank you. FYI, the rendering step on Wednesday night actually utilized some five computers of varying capability to accomplish, otherwise the timeframe would've been impossible.

marcc: The .obj export works decently. There are some weird issues, namely: Scaling issues... I can't remember what I had to scale by to get a rough 1 unit to 1 foot ratio, but it was odd. Texturing issues -- Sketchup texturing works by way of specificity: A group can have a texture, which applies to all faces in the group, and then a face within that group can have a texture, etc. This isn't handled very well by either AoI or the .obj format, I'm not sure which. Finally, the most apparent problem is that the import results in a lot of duplication. I can explain the issue in more depth if req'd, but let's just say I had to delete about 95% of the objects in my object list after import.

Vidiot: Yes, please do link to these images. All publicity for both AoI and my firm is a good thing. I think I explained the rendering settings up top pretty clearly. The noise comes from the GI blend. This allowed us to achieve good tonality, and the raytrace was used to "fill in the gaps". There is also a straight raytrace which turned out pretty decent, but isn't shown here. When we get this project officially up on our site, I'll post a link. Also, I think a little bit of noise adds to realism -- the problem with straight RT is that it's TOO clean.

aido179: Sketchup is actually quite powerful for architectural and design projects. I wouldn't recommend it for organic modeling. But then, I wouldn't yet recommend AoI for architectural modeling. We have done some very complicated scenes in Sketchup, and it's handled it decently. The scripting support is a huge bonus, too.

Nik: Thanks! The real trick with all of this is getting the textures right. Once you have a decent library of procedurals, it's not very hard to get a good looking scene, IMO. This is the area where AOI excels beautifully.

One more detail about the project: The light rig was one point light, bluish cast, out and above the space with 0 decay to approximate the sun, and 8 point lights inside the space with a large radius to provide an ambiance.

Thanks again folks!

Can we have the file??