I have my drawing done in Sketchup, and I want to present it to others. The Sketchup format won’t be of much use to anyone else.
I’d like to put a bit of appeal into, perhaps give the bland green a grass texture. Is there a way to do that? What about a natural sky with clouds? Perhaps some perimeter treelines?
What are some options for presentation? I’m not familiar with the powerful features that Sketchup Pro has to create an interactive type representation of the drawing.
Any direction or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
What you are looking for is in the rendering programs and plug ins that are offered, some are free and some are very spendy. This is an area that you will get what you pay for either in money and time or both.
First you need to decide what the presentation is for (and tell us).
You might want to create working drawings, for example. Clouds and grass not necessary.
As you mention clouds and grass, I imagine you are thinking of perspectives. But you might want dynamic output, such as a walk through. These things require different approaches.
Grass as a material is built into SU and there are ways of getting realistic skies using watermarks.
@RLGL has mentioned rendering outside of SU if you want true photorealism. But that involves additional, and often costly, software, a steep learning curve, and maybe a more powerful computer.
Thank you all. Wow! Quite complicated.
I’m hoping to present something realistic, as opposed to archetectual diagrams, plans etc. Walkthrough would be cool, bust suspect that’s getting even more advanced.
Right now I have an endless area around my drawing. How do I define the area I want to see? (hard to explain when you don’t know the terms properly. The left and right edges are bushlines, the right edges are the backs of houses, the back is a structure.
All the default green ground needs to be grass? Can I change the default to a texture? I know I can change the colour? Or do I have to trace everything to make faces for the grass?
I suppose the sky should be a wraparound watermark?
The more realistically you create your model, the more realistic it will appear. For example, the chain link panels on the backstop wouldn’t extend beyond the frame like you have it currently. Generally the infield wouldn’t be gray like you have it and there’d be a pitcher’s mound which would be raised a bit above the surrounding turf. Fixing and adding those kinds of detail issues will help to improve how realistic your model can appear.
At a real baseball field what limits the view and prevents you from seeing to the horizon? You can model the same way.
You can’t change the background color to a texture but you can draw a large face and apply a grass texture to that.
Depending on what it is you need to present, you might want to learn how to use a rendering program. They can add some realism in the way of sky images and other background stuff along with appropriate shadows and textures.
You should get in the habit of maintaining correct face orientation. The blue faces are back faces. If you choose to use a rendering application you should be aware that some of them have a difficult time with back faces.
Your model looks good, I know you have been working on it for some time now, congrats. There are many things you can do to improve the model, like reversing faces and making sure to group or make a component of all raw geometry, but you have come a long way.
The world of rendering is a big one with lots of options, including loads of third party programs. Here is a very quick file to get you started in playing with styles within SketchUp. I made a big surface and painted it with grass, then tweaked the style to remove lines and added shadows. Probably best to get a handle on how styles and shadow options work here within SketchUp first, before branching out into any other rendering software.
You guys are great. I appreciate your unselfishness sharing your skill with helping me learn some of the features of this application, and bringing light to my mistakes. As much as I would love to have the money and time to become proficient in this, that just insn’t an option, and I have to rely a lot on self teaching through tutorials and support from groups like this.
[quote=“DaveR, post:7, topic:123752”]
Generally the infield wouldn’t be gray like you have it and there’d be a pitcher’s mound which would be raised a bit above the surrounding turf. [/quote]
This infield actually has a gravel tecture applied to it, explaining the grey appearance. This diamond is multi-purpose and does not have a pitching mound.
Herein lies my questions at hand? In my case, the horizon line is obstructed by a combination of bushlines and houses. Do I have to place dozens of individual random overlapping layers of trees, shrubs and vegetation to give the effect of a bush line? And individual houses and yards for the other extent of the field? Can rendering software alone to this, or will rendering software only work with what is already in the model … eg individual clustered trees and individual houses?
I really don’t know how I create faces that are reversed. I just think I’m drawing a shape and applying a texture to it. I didn’t know I could draw it reversed, or how I inadvertently reversed them?
Hmmm. I’ve heard that before somewhere lol. And yes. I’m getting close to getting everything grouped. I think there is just one or two geometric constructs not part of a group yet.
I think I need to clean up my drawing before I muck things up further. I suspect that rendering will require a pretty clean model.
I’ve messed up my layers. I have a layer called infield which was just supposed to be the gravel playing area, but for some reason it took on the dugout and a portion of the infield arc. It appears that the final infield was created in layer 1. If I delete the ‘infield’ layer, I will lose my dugout. Is there a way to move a group/component between layers?
I created a new layer called grass. I draw a circle to encompass the area around my ball diamond and then applied a grass texture to it. Doing this revealed some problems.
the parking lot to the top left of of the image (‘PL’) got grassed over.
I have a chunk of grass encroaching into my infield at the 3rd base dugout. Anyone following my please for help here knows that I had great difficulty creating a face for my infield to apply a texture to it. I could not do it by simply tracing the whole perimeter. Just wasn’t happening. So I had to do it it chunks by joining line between opposite points of the infield and erasing those lines. I painted myself in a corner at the third dugout, and this is how it manifested my poor approach.
At the batters boxes, I cannot apply the gravel tecture to the inside of the boxes (in the image, the infield is selected.) I wonder if I actually had my infield on its own layer these issues would have been avoided.
I fixed the batters boxes issue.
The parking lot, well, no. The parking lot face is below the ground plane, so when the grass layer was applied, it covered the sunken lot.
The grass in front of the 3rd base dugout is troublesome. It needs to be part of the infield.
Did you open the file I posted? I raised the parking lot above the ground by two inches to avoid Z-fighting. Easy once you make component of the parking lot.
Hi ELF, yes I did notice that on your version. Thank you.
But it doesn’t really portray what is really happening (a true optical illusion dependding on how you look at it). Perhaps that’s the way it has to be. I can live with that as it’s really not the important part of the illustration. I think that is how you approached the infield as well? It’s slightly elevated above the grass and as such depending on the view there is a shadow under it.
You are right, I did a hack job of positioning things. I was thinking more of the file as an intro to the idea of styles, wondering if you had played with adjusting the style in SketchUp. As for the surrounding, you can model the trees and bushes around the field, but the file can get big very quickly as plants tend to be poly heavy. You could also import an image (even go take a picture if you are close enough) and place the 2D image in the background.
Deleting a layer doesn’t have to delete its contents. You get three options (on phone, so from memory).
Move to Current tag/layer
Move to Default tag/layer
Delete contents.
First, set the default tag to Untagged, or Layer0 in versions 2019 or earlier, AND LEAVE IT THERE (almost) ALWAYS.
Run the plugin Default Geometry to Layer0 to move ALL your geometry (edges and faces) to Untagged/Layer0.
As has been said earlier in this and other threads about your model, make components as you go, and give them meaningful names. Group or make components of any remaining loose geometry.
DON’T leave loose geometry in your model any longer than it takes you to draw it and make it into a component (or in my view, less usefully, a group).
Once you have your geometry on Untagged/Layer0, and have made all your remaining loose geometry into one or more components or groups (aka objects), THEN you can start or restart tagging your object.
One final more detailed point, your chain link fencing is very finely imaged but isn’t visible except really close up. You might want to try a coarser image for your render.
