SketchUp 7.1 Architectural Visualization 62
dango0 writes "SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization – Beginner's Guide is a detailed guide that will figuratively take you by the hand and teach you how to make stunning photorealistic and artistic visuals of your projects with free software and free resources that you can find all over the Internet." Read on for the rest of Dan's review.
Robin de Jongh is a consulting engineer and designer who has successfully used SketchUp for multi-million-pound new developments, and a whole bunch of smaller projects, from steel staircases to new product prototypes. He previously ran an architectural and product visualization company. Robin holds a degree in Computer Aided Product Design and is a professional engineer registered with the Institution of Engineering Designers in the UK. He writes a blog about SketchUp for design professionals. | SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization: Beginner's Guide | |
| author | Robin de Jongh |
| pages | 113 |
| publisher | Packt |
| rating | 5 |
| reviewer | Dan Farcas |
| ISBN | 1847199461 |
| summary | Create stunning photo-realistic and artistic visuals of your SketchUp models |
Frankly, when I saw that the book has 400+ pages, I thought "this thing is full of fluff and will bore me to death." But to my pleasant surprise I found a lot of descriptive pictures, and that's exactly what a visual-based guy like me understands best. So, without further ado, I'll make a brief presentation of the chapters that will enlighten your path to fast, easy and breathtaking presentations of your projects:
Chapter 1 – Quick Start Tutorial
This chapter is a fast forward for those impatient to get to the realistic sketchup scenes. Here you'll find out how to model the scene, fix the lights, add textures, background, and make a quick render in Kerkythea.
Chapter 2 – Plug in and Gear Up
You will find that with a couple of free plugins and some other software you can turn SketchUp into a fully functional 3D modeling, visualization and animation suite similar to . let's say 3D Max!!! (well the truth is this part made my jaw drop)
Chapter 3 – Composing the scene (free sample available)
This chapter will teach you how to make modeling a less hard work by setting your scene prior to starting work. Here you'll use CAD plans, site images or even Google Earth to build the optimized scene for quick rendering or animation. (I know you will love this part of the book, so I got a sample of this chapter from the publisher for you guys – See it Here)
Chapter 4 – Modelling for Visualization
The pro modeling methods you can learn here will save you both the time, and the hassle of working with large polygon counts that can slow down your PC considerably, and at the same time will show you how to make those photo real renderings we all love in a blink of an eye.
Chapter 5 – Applying Textures and Materials for Photo-Real Rendering
Since the world evolved really fast lately, we have at our disposal a lot of free online image resources, professional digital cameras, and so a really effective way of bringing the "model" to life. The tutorials you'll discover in this chapter will show you some unique photo and material handling tools to create surreal, mega easily textured scenes.
Chapter 6 – Entourage the SketchUp Way
Now you have a scene, with modeled buildings and applied textures, and the next step you wanna take is to make it shine with some Entourage, like cars, furniture, and of course trees and bushes and other nice things. In this chapter you'll learn how to find the best libraries, and also to create your own (that you can give to others, for FREE or CASH).
Chapter 7 – Non Photo Real with SketchUp
Some other free software that you will learn how to use is GIMP, a powerful photo editing photo suite, that can simulate sketchy pencil and watercolor styles. And yeah, almost forgot about this, you will learn the AWESOME "Dennis Technique".
Chapter 8 – Photo-realistic rendering
Some in depth presentation and step by step introduction into Kerkythea, the amazing free rendering software, with proven best settings for test renders and final outdoor and indoor scenes. This chapter amazed me, because it covers everything you need to know about getting professional photo-realistic renders out of a simple SketchUp model.
Chapter 9 – Important Compositing and After Effects in GIMP
We all know that the rendering process isn't the end of the line, because there's lots of subtle but important after effects you can apply to make the image even more effective. This particular chapter covers how to add reflections without rendering, creating depth of field effects from a depth render, adjusting levels for realistic daylight scenes, compositing real and rendered images.
Chapter 10 – Walkthroughs and Flyovers
Here you will find tutorials that will show you how to create storyboards, set up cameras and paths in SketchUp with extra plugin functionality, export test animations and final renders. Photo real animations are then composited to make a simple showreel.
Chapter 11 – Presenting Visuals in LayOut
This final chapter I really enjoyed since I like to play with layouts. The layout module is bundled as part of SketchUp Pro and is introduced in this final chapter for those who wish to explore the free trial before committing to Pro. You will learn how to bring together SketchUp models and artistic or rendered output into a screen presentation or printed portfolio, adding borders, text and dimensions.
I'm an architect, and I've worked with paid software before, but I gotta tell you, the free applications are most of the time way better than the paid ones, for the simple fact that they're made by passionate people who upgrade and tweak things all the time. If you want to learn how to use free software that delivers results time after time, please check out this book. I guarantee you won't throw your money away; the price for this book is way too low for the knowledge it shares and the results you can achieve.
You can purchase SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization: Beginner's Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Free is not always better (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait, where's the review? (Score:5, Interesting)
What we've got here is a table of contents with a few sentences giving a teaser-style description of what that chapter contains. And then a conclusion literally (in the literal sense of the word literally) begging people to buy the book.
Or, to put it another way, a review of this review:
Frankly, when I saw this article has 10+ paragraphs, I thought "this thing is full of fluff and will bore me to death." But to my surprise, it could be skimmed so quickly that I didn't have time to be bored, and that's exactly what an ADHD-type guy like me understands best. So, without further ado, I'll make a brief presentation of the review that will enlighten your path to fast, easy and breathtaking... moving on to other things.
Introduction:
There's a badly formatted section that tries to give you the technical details about who wrote the book and stuff.
Chapters:
Then, one by one, as if filling out the required length in a book report for 7th grade, each chapter in the book is described, but not in a way that tells you any more than what you'd get by just reading the titles.
Conclusion:
I'm a Slashdot reader, and I've read book reviews here before, but I gotta tell you, even though most of the time they're really poor, this one is exceptionally weak, for the simple fact that it tells you less than you'd get from simply looking at the book's entry on the publisher's web site. Or on Amazon, for that matter. If you want to learn whether this book is worthwhile, please check somewhere else. I guarantee you won't throw your money away; because I know you, and you're not the kind of person to just go and do that with your money on a whim. Right?
Re:Free is not always better (Score:3, Interesting)
I do architectural design and SU is not the answer to every problem. If you're doing multi-million dollar designs, heck, spend a couple bucks and use programs that are easier and more powerful. Sure, it can be fun to try to learn and navigate your way through the program, but give me my architectural design software with ease and simplicity and powerful photo-realistic images in a fraction of the time of SU. Play with free. Work with paid for programs.
Sometimes, you only need to create a design once, even on a paid project. For example, I was recently creating three dimensional views of an object for a patent application and used Sketchup because it was quick, easy, didn't need to be textured, and wasn't worth the purchase of a commercial program that I'd only use once.
Of course, your mileage may vary - doing many architectural designs like you do would quickly pay for the expense of a commercial program.