Wishing some common color processing options in SketchUp, esp. reducing color saturation or giving a tint such as a sepia-look.
Currently, if the user wishes to give a de-saturated or black-and-white effect to a model, this requires creating or editing each material used. Giving possibilities to reprocess textures at style level would allow to work with a reduced set of photographical textures and quickly apply the same effect to the whole model.
The option could be provided when defining a style, maybe also for given layers.
Just noting that a model can have different styles applied to different scene pages (that might also have the same camera setup.)
Color by Layer is one of the style’s properties. The layer colors could be “sepia-like”.
That said, this is a rendering request, and SketchUp is a modeling application, not really a rendering application. The installer is now up over 100MB, and if it had rendering built-in it would be huge.
IMO, keep extreme rendering as extension or extra-SketchUp processes. SketchUp should concentrate on doing modeling well, and let renders do the rendering.
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Just to clarify, the request is not about including photorealistic rendering capability into the core of SketchUp.
The effects suggested, such as colorizing or desaturating, should be much simpler to implement, btw they are also provided e. g. within common office word-processing or presentation software to render pictures included. So the intent is only to extend the existing basic style rendering options of SketchUp with features of a similar complexity level.
The difference with the “color by layer” feature is that the new option would apply also to photographic textures/materials like stone, wood, etc. This would facilitate the harmonization of colors of pre-existing materials. It could also be used to integrate model pictures in the color palette of existing documents.
I agree though that SketchUp should continue to concentrate on a simple, yet powerful set of functionalities and that it may not be easy to find the right balance.
The drop-down at the bottom of the styles menu can tint all the lines (edges) in a model; perhaps there could be one that tints all the textures too? (ie applies a colour filter to the screen.) I can’t imagine that this would take up much processing/programming.
Combining this with a vignette overlay texture, turning fog on, sketchy edges… would mix well to give that “old world” look.
Yes, thanks. This would be a very good implementation of my suggestion.