I have been looking into the capabilities of Blender for use as a photorealistic renderer for SU models. It’s hard to know how many people are using Blender this way, even if only as a cost-free gateway drug to “proper” render engines. There’s been a lot of discussion about using Blender as an alternative to SU but I’m not up for that.
I don’t suppose I am alone in mainly wanting something that will take an already impressive SU 3D rendered model and jazzing it up with more realistic lighting, without having too steep a learning curve or having to spend hours just to get a slightly better render. It will often be external views which means you can rely on a single light source, the sun.
Blender has a whole host of tools that aren’t necessary for this limited task. You probably don’t need:
Abilty to draw inside Blender;
Animation;
Material editing.
You may just need to be able to import backgrounds, adjust sun and shade settings, camera position, and not much else. If you want to go further, it’s nice to be able to add artificial light sources.
I read that Blender is not really optimized for architectural renders, but I am not sure if that just means it can do lots more many of us don’t need, or whether it means it is much harder to get a result than with other more focused software.
@chippwalters made a tutorial a couple of years back on a SU modelling / Blender (EVEE) rendering workflow. I’m not sure if he did one for exteriors, but the one I remember was specifically for architectural interiors:
I have been intending to go that route for a while now, but have been too busy with paid work to overcome the inertia of learning a new workflow… so don’t have any actual experience / expertise with this approach to share.
Yes, and that was a main driver for my post! I have watched a few of the excellent tutorial videos on the Blender website but I began to lose the will to live. So what I was hoping for was someone who already used it for what I described who could say “ignore this set of tools”, “don’t try doing that in Blender”, “here’s a quick and dirty way to render an external view of a building” that kind of thing. I think @JustinTSE may have done one or two tutorials like that. Maybe @chippwalters too?
I don’t render with Blender, but with Thea 4 Sketchup and Twinmotion. I use blender for a few things though and it’s much easier than it seems. There’s a lot of tutorials.
Search for:
Build your first shader/material with Blender;
Assign material to object in Blender;
Setup Sun and Sky in Blender;
Render with Cycles;
Render with Eevee.
You’ll see that for what you want to do, it will be quite easy.
Part of the problem is how complicated you can make everything.
If you just prep your model in SketchUp, then import to Blender and set everything up, it can be really simple, but once you get into swapping materials or anything like that it can get a lot more complicated.
The way models are created (with vertices, faces, etc) are much more important in Blender because of things like UV mapping. A lot of SketchUp models with poor topology just don’t translate well.
That said, if you develop the technical knowledge of how everything works in Blender, it’s a very powerful tool
Justin, I watched that video of yours and very good it was too. But its focus was on interiors and artificial lighting. Now if you could do one by using a building and sunlight…
Yeah this is a bit of a tricky topic to cover in a single video because it requires a lot of understanding both of how SketchUp works, how Blender works, and how moving the geometry back and forth works.
It’s definitely something else I could cover though - I’m assuming you’d be looking for something that really focuses on importing the building to Blender from SketchUp, doing just a bit of cleanup, then quickly applying something like HDRI lighting and exporting a rendered image?
Yes, I was imagining something along those lines. In fact, a lot like your video with the chair but using the outside of a building and using sun for lighting.
Podium has some excellent videos and it might be a better bet than Blender. But as Blender is free, for those of us who only need a more realistic render once in a while, it would be awesome to be able to use it. It is obviously much, much more powerful than the average Sketchupper needs, so I imagine it is manly a question of knowing which tool set to use and how.
It took me about 1 year to learn how to model and render in Blender. Just for the rendering part it would have been about 2 months (but 6 full days a week, sometimes 10 hours a day). So it does take a while, but it’s certainly possible to get fantastic exterior shots, I think the whole ‘Blender is not as good at exterior work’ is more from the 2.79 days and now we are on 2.93 with many new features like enhanced sun etc.
I didn’t take any specific exterior tutorials I just learnt how to use it overall and now I can use that knowledge for exterior. I did have a lot of time on my hands due to Covid and not having to work so I chalked up almost 3000 hours but now I am very proficient there isn’t much I could not make.
That’s really handy to know. I think it knocks Blender out of the park for me. For someone who just needs the occasional output that is a bit better than what SU does out of the box, I can’t justify a learning curve that steep. I suspect I will just have to decide between not having the facility or spending a bit on something like Podium that does seem to produce useful output fairly simply.
Yeah it was certainly a time sink, for me it was needed as my main focus was modeling and animation, even if you just focus on rendering it will be a few months and a lot of hours,
Maybe look at Unreal Engine & Twinmotion. The learning curve for Unreal is much less (you can have a good hold of it after a weekend) and for Twinmotion is non-existent but I believe it’s not free anymore. @JustinTSE has quite a lot of tutorials that will get you setup (I think). If not the official Unreal ones are free and good.
Not too many for Unreal Engine yet - if I go down that road, it would likely be its own channel. Unreal is just so…big. There’s a lot of foundation that you have to learn to really utilize that program, but I have high hopes for the Twinmotion/Unreal Engine Bridge
Twinmotion 2021 “demo” is available for non-commercial use. (it’s not really a demo, and it doesnt expire)
For quality (realistic, non-biased) renders, Indigo makes IndigoRT (a “lite” edition) which is €145 for a perpetual license. It should do what you need (ie,model materials etc within sketchup and just use the renderer for lighting).
A trial would be a good place to start. I’d invest no more than a few days in learning Indigo (or Twinmotion). Most of the tricky stuff is in getting advanced materials looking perfect, atmospherics, motion, etc…it’s a bottomless pit of trial and error!
I am on a Mac with an AMD Radeon GPU so D5 (which I hadn’t heard of) is out, I guess.
The two big things here are time and money. If you have bottomless pits of both, the world’s your oyster. One could fill one’s boots with VRay, Unreal Engine, etc, and have a blast. There’s a bloke out there doing great videos on Blender. I watched one about creating a scene with a hut in a forest. He ended up with 10 seconds of animation. It only took him several weeks of work, with full days at it, and some solid experience of Blender before he started. That’s someone who doesn’t have to work for a living!
It may well be that it is not possible to produce anything worthwhile without investing a lot of time and/or money. That’s really what I am trying to bottom out.
but now I am very proficient there isn’t much I could not make.
