After seeing Aaron’s Lego model thought to share some personal projects renderings. My son loves building robots with Lego Duplo bricks. At some point, I’ve started recreating them in SketchUp (under my son’s art direction.) They were not complicated but he designed them when he was 3 years old. Well, all parents super excited about what their kids do and I’m no exception. Anyway, I had fun and learned a lot while building them.
I’ve modelled two sets of bricks for these builds. One set is sharp-edged and the other with bevelled edges. I use a sharp set to build robots and then paint them into a certain color scheme. Once happy with the result I replace each sharp-edged brick to its bevelled equivalent with the help of components pannel. What is great is that you don’t have to recolor your model after this process.
I’ve only briefly tried out Adobe Dimensions, and I noticed it also has a Match Photo type feature. You’re reminding me to get back and try it out some more.
It seems to use the same approach that Maxwell and some other renderers use, perhaps using radiosity. It’s a slower rendering technique, but can give photo realistic results.
I love SketchUp and try to use it in my daily graphic design work. There are some cons of course, like hard to control edge thickness and edge color or one of my most hated thing - absolute mess with bevelled/chamfered/ rounded corners. Nonetheless, as I said I love SketchUp.
SketchUp could be used in different ways. With the help of Fredo Animator extension, it can be used even for motion graphics. Every year graphic designers, illustrators and other creative enthusiasts participate in 36 Days of Type event. It’s a 36 days long challenge when you need to design your vision of Latin alphabet and numbers and post it on Instagram every day within these 36 days. Challenge is that you basically have a day to design each letter and number. This year I’ve used Sketchup to design my alphabet inspired by great Japanese designer Takenobu Igarashi. This was done in SketchUp and animated with Fredo Animator extension. I’ve only cropped and exported GIFs with the help of Photoshop.
Design, rendering and animation was not something that took most of my time while working on this personal project. Bevelled/rounded/chamfered corners were something that took hours of frustration to fix and make it work. If GODS of SketchUp hear me, PLEASE!!! make rounding corners something easy and fast thing to do in SketchUp. I don’t know how you figure this out. Do the MAGIC!!!
Here’s another approach. It’s interesting in that it is an impossible object that cannot truly exist in 3D space but it was modelled initially in Sketchup exploiting the fact that in parallel projection things that are not co-planar can be made to appear so. It was exported as as multiple 2D layers from Sketchup, brought into Photoshop where render and lighting were created by hand. The lego figures and other accessories are real - photographed with precisely chosen angles to fit their final destination in the image. Shadows and reflections are created entirely in Photoshop…
