Bunyip02 said:

Just doing a quick drawing, tracing the base plan, will then do some quick sides, roof, path around the building, and add a few details.
Is not to engineering standards, just a rough-as-guts block-offset-layout. Suitable for 3D modelling only.
(Once I have the basic shape in Architools I am planning to morph it out into another type of building)

Let me know if you want a copy of the "rough-as-guts" plans I am doing.
Don't worry about the drafting, while I am now out of work due to ill health I have been doing drafting since I learnt AutoCAD Release 12,
which was a while ago now !!!!!

DraftSight (which is very similar to AutoCAD) is available at :- http://www.3ds.com/products-services/draftsight/overview/

hey, wow, you are organised!!!!!
amazing :)

I have been putting off approaching this one as I have 24 images to do and have finished 19 in two weeks, all 24 by 20 by 300 dpi .... gah.

This looks like you atre doing a pro job!!! There is a mob here in Newcastle who does historical work - reconstrucing the early settlement etc with fly overs. I think they could be very interested in your work considering the details you are putting in. I think their fly by guy uses google sketchup ??

here is the link http://coalriver.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/virtual-newcastle-circa-1800-1830-ad/

:)

music2u4u said:

Found these at the Sketchup Warehouse. Pretty nice 64 two door and the 66 Nova SS was always one of my favs.

:-)

I went and ddownload both the moment I saw your post, also found a 66 GTO!

Found these at the Sketchup Warehouse. Pretty nice 64 two door and the 66 Nova SS was always one of my favs.

:-)

Bruce you could also take that first object and rework it in Sketchup so you end up with separate pieces. Or just use Oroboros's very nice object.

Oroboros & GussNemo,
Thanks for the quick reply, and sorry for the slow one of mine to yours.

After reading GussNemo's post, I determined that the models I was trying to work with were not made of individual polygons or vertices.

This is one of the two models I had downloaded from the 3D Warehouse and converted into an OBJ file with Sketchup.

Geodesic Catalog • Class I • High Frequency

I also used the Class II sphere.

This is the image that was the inspiration for what I am trying to create. I am trying to make a background image for my site. This image shows the sphere from the outside. My goal is to position the camera in the center of the sphere looking out, with the vertices looking very much like the vertices in this image against a black background.

http://element05.deviantart.com/art/Apple-Partikal-12671172

It appears as though I need to find a different model.

Open to suggestions.

Of course in Device manager only one shows up, Nvidia.I see no forceware in my system, I uninstalled the whole package in safe mode, reinstalled in safe mode the official 340.52 driver instead of the beta 82. I must say that every other piece of software seems to highly benefit of this new version of the driver, but DAZ simply rejects it.
Remember that it accepts version 331 that was equipped with OpenGL 3. Seems definitely that the picky sofware with open GL is DAZ. Blender works beautifully, same with Sketchup.

Robert Freise said:

Nice pics

Thanks, now here are some of the new toys I was using to make those pics possible!

Got some new toys over this past week, found these items on the 3D warehouse, some stuff there is nicely detailed, and now that Sketchup has a way of exporting obj files, it makes perfect sense to use some of the models that appear there.

I did have some issues, whether that issue is with that particular installation of Sketchup, or with Blender, I'm not sure, but I was able to actually rework these models on my No1 computer, with the older installations of the same programs, I may need to update or reload some of the programs on my DAZ computer, however, everything came out good when I worked them on my gaming pc.

Wendy, thank you for a tip. There is a huge library of free SketchUp models and a possibility to render them in Carrara would be valuable help. To be honest I need more architectural scenes to develop my rendering skills and an access to Sketchucation library would be of great help.

Greetings
Marek

I never tried it via iClone 3dx 5 pipeline because my antivirus blocked the site and I err on the side of caution
there is an obj exporter on sketchucation that is free I have for sketchup 8
as said though will choke on huge models most are fine though.
the 400+ texture ones the problem.

I've changed my google drive set up to public for all of you that have an access to the link. It should work now. If not let me know.

My route in converting it was to open in SketchUp Make 2014, delete all the trees in the scene an export to .obj. Additionally I opened it in Hexagon and exported to .car. Unfortunately it exported only one mesh of the whole scene. Materials and textures are complete and shading domains saved well too. OBJ comes with mtl file but Carrara file has textures saved internally so it is huge one.

Fortunately the trees are easy to add from your own collections. According to the rules of the contest we can change materials and shaders as far as they resemble original materials to maintain overall look of the architecture. We can add items to enrich nad light the scene.

It is possible to export from SU to AutoCad dxf and Collada dae files that could be opened in Carrara too but I didn't try. Maybe it is worth to check it out. It is apparently a serious problem exporting from SU to another kind of 3D file I see.

Master your rendering skills and win the contest!!! Good luck!

Marek

ProPose said:

de3an said:

makma said:

Wendy, It wasn't easy to convert it to obj and eventualy I did it with a help of HEXAGON... I wrote here that this app is really underrated. Maybe it helps you to get it from my google drive:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6mfD8JV0-b2ejZ0Ty1uNnZNWTg&usp=sharing

Try! There are files of obj and mtl and a huge file of Carrara with textures saved internally. Both versions are without the trees that for some reason made problems. I will be glad if you could take part in this contest using these files.

I've also been trying to convert this model to something that Carrara could load, but with no success.
I tried to access your Google drive link but was denied access.

From what I can see theses are sketchup models. So if you have or use Sketchup, then you can export to obj, or dae or fbx, etc.

That's correct, it is a Sketchup file.
I have a free version of Sketchup, but it doesn't have an obj export option. Apparently, according to their website, only the paid Pro version has the larger variety of export options.
I'm using Sketchup version 8, which is the lasts version that will run on my operating system. I can't run the 2014 version, but it looks like it also requires the pro version for obj export.
I tried the dae/collada export option, but it did not produce a usable file for Carrara to import.

de3an said:

makma said:

Wendy, It wasn't easy to convert it to obj and eventualy I did it with a help of HEXAGON... I wrote here that this app is really underrated. Maybe it helps you to get it from my google drive:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6mfD8JV0-b2ejZ0Ty1uNnZNWTg&usp=sharing

Try! There are files of obj and mtl and a huge file of Carrara with textures saved internally. Both versions are without the trees that for some reason made problems. I will be glad if you could take part in this contest using these files.

I've also been trying to convert this model to something that Carrara could load, but with no success.
I tried to access your Google drive link but was denied access.

From what I can see theses are sketchup models. So if you have or use Sketchup, then you can export to obj, or dae or fbx, etc.

makma said:

Thank you all for your interest!
Dustrider, thank you for your help.
Evilproducer, your are right. I forgot about disabling ambient. Tim writes about that in his manual.

Now I just look for interesting composition of light. Just to train it further I made test renders in Thea Studio via SketchUp plug-in. I limited rendering time to 20 minutes to get every picture test ready - with the trees. Lighting comes from Thea sun but IBL is free HDRI map from Viz-People site. Rendered with GPU cores only though Thea has an option to use CPU and GPU together. For a reference my box has Intel Core2Quad inside, 8 GB RAM and Geoforce GTX 660 OC card for rendering and display and WIN7 64. Raw renders again. Click to enlarge.

I think it would be interesting to compare them against 20 minutes renders in Octane just to have an idea which one is a better investment. Personaly I prefer Thea for shaders system and many different rendering engines available. Last but not least it works with 3D connexion mouse!
Probably it is time for some post production tests and final renders.

Greetings
Marek

Thank you all for your interest!
Dustrider, thank you for your help.
Evilproducer, your are right. I forgot about disabling ambient. Tim writes about that in his manual.

Now I just look for interesting composition of light. Just to train it further I made test renders in Thea Studio via SketchUp plug-in. I limited rendering time to 20 minutes to get every picture test ready - with the trees. Lighting comes from Thea sun but IBL is free HDRI map from Viz-People site. Rendered with GPU cores only though Thea has an option to use CPU and GPU together. For a reference my box has Intel Core2Quad inside, 8 GB RAM and Geoforce GTX 660 OC card for rendering and display and WIN7 64. Raw renders again. Click to enlarge.

I think it would be interesting to compare them against 20 minutes renders in Octane just to have an idea which one is a better investment. Personaly I prefer Thea for shaders system and many different rendering engines available. Last but not least it works with 3D connexion mouse!
Probably it is time for some post production tests and final renders.

Greetings
Marek

Hi!
Only two weeks left to conclude the contest of 3D WORLD CONTEST. Free Romain Demerville model Minimalist Modern Eco House is available for a render contest.
http://www.sketchuptexture.com/2014/08/ ... house.html
It is a good time to test our new realistic rendering skills - thanks to Phil - and new toy – Octane plug-in.
I tried to discover what was the reason to crash my renderings with Tim Payne's environmental light rigs and I’ve found that my mistake was allowing Sky Light in render settings. Thus the engine counted light both from the rig and a background map together. Perhaps it was to much for it. Disabling it and leaving only indirect lighting works fine. The results are presented below.
I exported the scene from free Sketchup Make 2014 to obj and 3ds formats. Unfortunately only obj works. It is OK and complete. Started with trees I got 2 inches of the picture rendered after an hour with ridiculous info that the estimated rendering time was 180 hours… I deleted the trees and got average render time of 4 hours. I tried to change the shaders a bit because the shaders imported from SU got only texture maps. I gave it additional bump maps but the rendering time increased three times so I abandoned it. I tried to use other bigger maps but the rendering time was huge so I neglected to use them as well.
For lighting I used different Tim’s rigs. They work good providing good scale of the model. I used a red cube of 1 cubic meter as a scale reference. I put it into the door and up scaled whole model 30 times to get it in right dimensions.
These are the results. Raw renders, no PS. C&C welcomed.

All the pictures are rendered in 2000 px of width following good advice of jamie Cardoso, an author of very interesting book on realistic rendering “Crafting 3D Photorealism: Lighting Workflows in 3ds Max, mental ray and vray”. It is written with 3DMAX and Vray in mind but the principles of profesional workflow remain the same. He recommends that the renders should be minimum 3500 px of width to avoid grain but it is too much for my 8GB RAM memory.

So go for it and try your luck in the contest.
Greetings
Marek

hacsart said:

Thanks all for the GTA conversion info.. time to either rethink, and/or do some more research.. In the meantime, sticking with what I do have,some more bikes, this time using an older version of the Billy-T bikes.
This one gave me no end of hassles using the Yosemite HDRI sets - would crash at 75% render o matter what., remove the model, and no issues, render using another model, and no issues - either was something with the mesh itself or the shaders - replacing the Uberenviroment with the AoA advanced distant light solved it..
Love the mix and match on the Billiy-T stuff.. Only change was to pull the FL style headlight from a Sketchup model and import that into Daz.. The first pic is close to what my '36 ULH looked like (save for the Knucklehead style motor in the render rather than the big Flathead)..

These all look good. I like the third one best, but I like the front forks on the first one best. So mix those two and you got it!...lol.

:-)

If you made the model using sketchup or cad the verticies are not ubiformally distriuted on faces and the UV then bleeds across the fase because poly boundries are shared. BLacksmith and other paint tools PER PIXEL settings to accomidate for this. Other and better option if you want to rig, is to retopo or use UUW poly smoothing and equalization tool to remesh for subd.

Yup, that eyelash flap is the eyelash viewed without the transparency settings set correctly.
I use Blender to convert models I make in SketchUp and recently I've been making trees... the same thing happens with the leaves... since I was not going to actually use the tree in Blender, I didn't test this much beyond seeing if this worked, but this did seem do what it was supposed to...
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Tutorials/Textures/Use_Alpha_for_Object_Transparency
I hope that will solve your problem, or at least head you in the right direction.

Edit- Yeah, what Szark said above... especially if you want to use DAZ figures... mcjTeleBlender is very cool.

Thanks all for the GTA conversion info.. time to either rethink, and/or do some more research.. In the meantime, sticking with what I do have,some more bikes, this time using an older version of the Billy-T bikes.
This one gave me no end of hassles using the Yosemite HDRI sets - would crash at 75% render o matter what., remove the model, and no issues, render using another model, and no issues - either was something with the mesh itself or the shaders - replacing the Uberenviroment with the AoA advanced distant light solved it..
Love the mix and match on the Billiy-T stuff.. Only change was to pull the FL style headlight from a Sketchup model and import that into Daz.. The first pic is close to what my '36 ULH looked like (save for the Knucklehead style motor in the render rather than the big Flathead)..

Teri 2 said:

I would love to have an old truck model like these from 1918. Does anyone know if they already exist? If not, would someone like to try their hand at making one? It would have to be on a freebie basis cause I'm broke.

Do you perhaps use SketchUp also? If you search for old trucks at the Google Warehouse of SketchUp you may find something. I remember I had got something in this line but not quite so from there. One have to export it as an .obj and it opens great then in Bryce. But to search on there is not always easy and with the new way they have set the website now sometimes frustrating. Use all possible keywords to find including the year of the model, i.e. 1918 truck, vintage truck, vintage vehicle, etc. I hope you can find something!

Teri, if you do find a similar one you want, please let me know too. I am also interested in all vintage related models. :-)