Some cool examples of my own

Here’s a real project example of how I use 45° shadows in elevations as we were taught to do in school with a 45° triangle. (Shows you how old I am) I’ve created a post to explain how I do this, and put it here.

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Very nice work!
Why aren’t there any windows on the back side? Because of the property boundary?
I also work on elevations at the moment. But I want to get rid of the geometry below the terrain.

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Yes, plus it’s the north side and the opposite side from the main house. If the upstairs space were ever finished, windows would probably be added, but not as it’s unfinished attic for now.

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If you “generate a group from slice” of your section cut, you can use that as a filled shape in layout to mask any underlying geometry which would save drawing that shape in layout… or elsewhere.

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Very nice working drawing! Thanks for sharing…Mick C

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I’m revisiting an illustration I did a couple years ago. This shows in 3D what FEMA maps and FEMA manual illustrations imply for the project. It was for presentation on Coastal Area Management Review which we often have to do on the shoreline in Connecticut. There are two types of flood planes: Velocity Zone (wave action) and a common A zone (standing water). My original illustration just showed the higher flood plane elevation for the V zone as a flat plane, but it would be a better illustration if it showed how the higher elevation actually comes from wave crests, not just a magically higher water level. After figuring out how to make a sine wave, I made simple waves in the water. The next task is to make the waves blend out into still water.

Original Illustration:

Revision work in progress:
GZ01%20Flood%20Illust%232%2020190109

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you could tapper the amplitude of the sine function and generate the results…

maybe…

john

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I started a separate thread here for just this specific issue.

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Rob, do you think it would be possible, to do all this inside of SketchUp? Importing the background/foreground as png-Textures (foreground with alpha)? And then do the Rendering also inside SketchUp with Vray or something similar? This would provide a very short workflow.

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Okay, okay, you’ve prompted me to try out the solution I’ve been wondering about: Watermarks. I’ve never used watermarks, but here’s what I found.

I saved out a PNG (not JPEG because JPEG doesn’t have transparency(?)) of that foreground “matte” (mask) layer shown above and brought it into SU as a watermark. That way it can provide the foreground matte while the match photo picture provides the background photo and the SU model is sandwiched in between. It seems to work for presenting right in SU. For photo realistic renderers like V-Ray or Podium, you would still want to merge them in Photoshop.

Adding a watermark via the Styles Pallette
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Making it foreground as apposed to background.
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Make it fit the screen just as the Photomatch Photo does.
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The catch is each Photomatch scene will require it’s own style with it’s own matching watermark.21%20PM

Result in SketchUp after all that.

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Each scene can be saved with its own unique watermark.

Personally I prefer to make the composites in photoshop as there is more control on how the two blend, feather etc.

Separately from an aspect of the selected style for the scene? The Scenes palette doesn’t specifically mention watermarks.

Yeah, I agree. This does allow for the matte to work during a live, in SketchUp presentation as well as a SketchUp generated animation.

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Since the watermark image is part of the style, you would wind up with a different style for each watermark image. The rest of the style properties could match between styles, of course.

That’s what I was thinking. If I have a file with 6 different Match Photo scenes, each with it’s own foreground watermark, I’m going to have 6 different styles whose only difference is the watermark itself, let alone other scenes. Has anyone asked for Cascading Style Sheets in SketchUp? That sounds like a big, complicated request.

Yes. Exactly. And it doesn’t matter whether you have Match Photo scenes or not.

It wouldn’t surprise me if someone has asked but you’re probably right that it’s complicated.

I believe the watermark is updated in the scenes option under styles/fog

…with the watermark being turned on and chosen for the style in effect for the scene. As far as I can tell, the style palette is the only place to choose and turn on/off the appearance of a watermark.

That’s correct. As I said before, the watermark and its display state are style properties.

So, what I see coming on the horizon is, if, after making 6 or whatever different styles (of some starting style) just with different watermarks, you want to go back and, say, want to bump up the line weight of profiles, you would have to visit each copy of the style and perform the same edit 6 or more times. Cascading Style Sheets were invented for that kind of thing, but I’m not sure such a feature is worth the trouble from the developer’s point of view.

Yes. I wonder if it would be possible to write a script that would allow one to make the same edit to multiple styles in one step.