I’m new to the forum…. I come from a VFX background but now work in visualization for a custom home builder.
I need to be able to easily go from Architectural plans to Vray. I’ve spent alot of time in Sketchup and am very happy with the results i get with Vray. But Sketchup doesn’t work “easily” with plans. I thought that maybe i would build in Chief Architect, bring into Sketchup and render with Vray.
Did anyone have thoughts about that pipeline?
Included is a recent render emblematic of the quality i hope to achieve.
I suppose if your working for a builder the source of the drawings is different for each project. So obtaining a model from the design firm might not be possible. I often loft a building from a PDF or sometimes a photo taken with a cel phone. It doesnt take me long to replicate the 2d plan view. I have the benefit of already having a complete model when I need to create renders, however the scenes I use for renders have much more detail than needed to create construction documents. To quickly create the “shell” of a building you should take a look at the Medeek extensions. You can quickly trace around a 2d plan view creating walls with exterior cladding, interior drywall ect. then add window assemblies with trim. Then you can focus on the scenes you want to render adding textures lighting and detail for the render. The Medeek website https://design.medeek.com/ has many detailed tutorials to give you an idea of the capabilities.
Define ‘fast’?
How many plans are you rendering a day, week, month?
Are you just making ‘pretty pictures’, or do they have to be accurate to the buildable plans, or ‘just good enough’ to entice someone to buy?
If you are working at production level - do you really need VRay quality? Doesn’t CA offer any rendering options / ability? What formats can you export to?
Have you looked at options that work directly with Chief Architect?
I assume you figured out how to take an image of a plan view drawing and size it in SketchUp. It looks like you have a handle on the rendering and just need to get up to speed on getting the model where you need it. Medeek has a bit of a learning curve, lots of settings to get the resullts you want but once you use it a little modeling a single family home can be done very fast. One tip is setup your scenes and tags before modeling with medeek. Especially the tags. Medeek creates a ton.
My Sketchup Template looks like this so when I model with Medeek things are organized. You can start modeling then organize and create a template from that. Its a time saver. Then create basic scenes where the tags are suited to that scene. All included in your template. Also Dont purge tags! A Medeek regen or new editing to the model will place the tags un organized in the root of the tag folder.
In regards to plans, often a PDF has a DWG/DXF as its core. I bring individual PDF pages into Illustrator and output a DXF to import into Sketchup.
I then take a known dimension (preferably the longest dimension) and using the tape measure tool measure that longest length from within the imported DXF group and type in the size I want it to be. This then brings the entire plan to full size to work in.
I then will use the grouped DXF imported file, which is now at full scale, as the base underlay which is snap-able to make native SU lines, groups etc to generate the object I need, ie walls etc.
I make a tag for the DXF file group and hide it once I have the native SU model so I can hide it as will bey switching that tag visibility.
My experience with using the DXF directly often creates models with a million segments in the line work and as a result a painful SU model to work with.
