Eric's Gallery of Random Musings

I found a great free resource the other day for people who want/need to work on large terrain models - Tangram Heightmapper

Once you save a height map of your location, you need Thom Thom’s Bitmap to Mesh extension to convert to 3D surface. Note make sure to reduce image resolution to 500-1000 pixels as anything bigger may not import as it tries to generate so much geometry.

Here’s a quick example of Yosemite to scale (fyi that’s a person on top of Half Dome there):



Cheers.

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Little bit of fun today playing with V-Ray Fur and 3D Text. Playful colors, monsters and name inspired by my 4 year old girl.


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Just thought I’d throw some SketchUp love out there in these trying times. I love the fact that I can pop a couple megascans rocks into my model…move them around, distort them…then pop in a couple of pre-made space ships, etc form 3DWarehouse…tweak some light and fog settings…and 30 mins later kick out a decent looking render. I can’t imagine doing this so easily and intuitively in any other program. *no photoshop post production…all color corrections done in V-Ray VFB.





One more with some post-production and hidden edges showing:

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Another rendering from my ‘2 hour’ render challenge I set for myself. This one obviously inspired by Avatar. Trees from Laubwerk. Skatter used for forest. Floating islands were from Megascans rocks. Vehicles from 3D Warehouse.

Inspiration:

Finished Render:
005_Avatar_Color

Process:
Starting point. Not sure where things were going yet…

For the ‘floating rocks’, I flipped a Megascans rock group upside down and broke it into two parts…the upper part being used as the base to ‘skatter’ vegetation onto:

An early render test to find a good camera angle and see how the ‘floating rocks’ look when placed in the scene:

SketchUp model 12.8 million edges with 8.3 million faces :+1:


And HDRI used for environmental lighting - https://www.renderhub.com/renderhub/lythwood-field-8k-hdri

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Was inspired by today’s Live modeling session with Aaron and Tyson…had to do one myself – using a slightly different workflow. Gotta love how many different ways there are to accomplish the same task.

Happy Halloween!

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This is a repeat from 2019 but as they say…'if it ‘aint broke…’ Happy Valentines day. SU+Skatter+V-Ray.


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I am a bit colour blind, and got confused about the scale so I first thought “someone has spilt cat food on the floor”. Happy Valentine’s Day!

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HA @Anssi - If I had stated that my background was in landscape architecture - hence the use of trees, that may have helped. Here I am standing in the middle of the ‘Heart’ forest (for scale) :wink:
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I came across these great paper illustrations by Eiko Ojala the other day…


…and thought it might be a fun exercise to recreate one in SketchUp.

The process:

Here is the final, rendered with V-Ray with some minor edits in Photoshop:

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Wonderfully done!

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Thanks @brandall !

Clowning around a bit this morning before getting serious and focused on work. I need to at some point teach myself quad /subdivision modeling so I can do this properly :wink:

Process breakdown:

And final result:

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Thanks @brandall

Been awhile since I’ve posted…so I’d like to take a min to send out some positive vibes around my recent experience with SketchUp. I’ll be the first to admit that SketchUp isn’t perfect (as much as we all expect it to be)…but that’s ok. I’ve always focused on what SketchUp can do vs can’t. Or perhaps what I can do with SketchUp. It’s changed everything about how I work…both professionally and for personal projects.

Below is an example of the variety of deliverables I worked on just yesterday:

  1. A classic cartoon whale’s head that will be eventually displayed using Augmented Reality (AR) where you can go into it’s mouth to find a hidden scavenger hunt item (*spoiler alert - come to 3DBC in Sept. to experience it yourself).

  2. Rendering teaser graphics for our Live Modeling session this Friday at 11 am PT/Noon MT (hope to see you all there).

  3. And a poster design for a friend’s event coming up (I don’t even know how to offset curves in Illustrator :stuck_out_tongue: ).

And while Blender may be better for organic modeling…D5/ Unreal for visualization…and Illustrator/InDesign for graphic design…I’m happy knowing I can do ALL three of those in just one app.

Happy Wed.

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Now that’s some very cool modeling! Thanks for posting :+1:

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Thanks. And fun too!

Cool. I just stumbled into making a maze/labyrinth for AR. The fun abounds!

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This is completely awesome. I need to know more about that whale head.

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You have to come to 3D Basecamp to see/experience the final result!

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So I’ve been tooling with this idea to recreate the famous Joy Division ‘Unknown Pleasures’ album cover using a real-world site terrain to mimic the look of the waves - fun fact it’s actually a ‘stacked plot’ of the radio emissions given out by a pulsar, or a rotating neutron star (c. 1971).

So here’s my process breakdown:

Found a terrain location that looked interesting - here is Comanche Peak in Colorado:


Then ‘sliced’ the terrain using a copied plane and ‘intersect with model’.


The resulting slices.

Used the Move tool to ‘stretch’ the end lines out east/west.

Here it is looking head on oblique.

Changed the Style to be black background and black front faces with white edges.

And for fun, a title. Happy Friday.

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