since i'm being a lamer

[piranha]

and still totally caught up in sketchup monomania, i've uploaded some of my work in progress so y'all can have a look at what i am doing if you want to. questions welcome.

http://picasaweb.google.com/pleochroic/WorkInProgress

hope everyone is alright; one of these days i will at least _read_ LJ again.

Comments

[amagranz.livejournal.com]

holy crap, you got the textures dead on in the "shackalicious abode" model. including the fucking shadows! nice, nice, nice.

i was always so terrified by textures that i just have a lot of, um, nice abstract white sketchup models. ;-) it's just so easy to get them a little bit wrong, and then -- boom, that's where your eye jumps...

textures

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

well, i cheat. :) i took the picture from exactly that angle and later set the time in sketchup appropriately. the shack doesn't look as shackelicious from the right corner. :) generally i like procedural textures and not projected ones, but for this cause it makes sense to use actual images.

i'll have to take a whole set of straight-on images for the final texturizing. images for building are best taken from a 45° angle, but buldings that are also textured with the same images look much less good from many other angles. so now i know when i head out to model nanaimo to take two sets of images; one for building, one for texturing. sketchup really does only planar projection as well; spherical objects look like crap with projected textures. *gah*, no uv-map! i know, this keeps it easy, but coming from the luxury yacht of 3D software, easy feels like a real handicap occasionally, when i know exactly what i need to do, but i can't actually do it in sketchup. still, i am having a blast.

google earth is mostly a challenge because it wants tiny, tiny models with as few polygons as possible, while i want to built poly-heavy models with every detail. :)

Re: textures

[amagranz.livejournal.com]

well, mediocre artists look like they're cheating, great ones cheat well! ;-)

yeah, sketchup and maya are a weird pair to compare -- basically, complete opposites in capability and feel. have you ever used rhino? probably the most popular one for archie students (though sketchup is gaining, as it gets more powerful...).

and i think that google earth is going to have to change its wicked ways if it wants to offer anything people are going to want to use. or it'll come in time with more power and bandwidth...

[prairierabbit.livejournal.com]

Glad to see you've been away doing something enjoyable, if monomaniac! *g*

[flarenut.livejournal.com]

Darn. Doesn't work for me. Link says there's nothing there. Maybe I just have the wrong machine or the wrong browser.

Ooh, never mind. I can get there by clicking through the gallery. Cool! Not exactly pretty yet, but cool.