Welcome back to My 30 Days of Architectural Design In SketchUp Challenge, where I spend at least one hour every day working on architectural design in SketchUp. Today is Day 8. We’ve just finished the last few bits of modeling on Day 7 and are about to start with V-Ray and rendering. Let’s dive in!
Day 8 – Returning For Real… Hopefully
If you’ve been following this series closely, you may have noticed that the gap between this post and Day 7 has been five days. I was supposed to build new momentum after recovering from my cold, but that has not happened.
The biggest problem during the last few days has been finding my footing again. I forgot how difficult it is to return to my regular schedule after a two-week hiatus.
I had also been thrown curveballs in my schedule, leading me to sleep later than I wanted. This ultimately led to taking long naps in the afternoon when I usually spent time on this architectural challenge.
However, things are returning to normal, so hopefully, I’m returning to this challenge for real.
Trees, Cameras, Action!
It was an excellent return to this challenge, though. I first finished the final touches to this project before introducing V-Ray by adding trees to my model.
After adding trees, the following few videos were on setting up scenes to prepare for rendering. I liked that the course instructor talked about architectural photography and how we 3D modelers should try to think like building photographers when creating renderings. It puts things in a different perspective that helps guide us toward creating better renderings.
Understanding things like the two-point perspective, which makes the vertical lines of a building look straight, and how different camera lenses are used to see the building better helps you create good scenes to be rendered in SketchUp as well.
While working on adjusting the camera angle, I also set up the initial V-Ray settings for today. We played around with settings such as quality and the safe frame option and ran initial interactive renders to see how our model currently looks as a render.
Making Good Progress
Overall, there was good progress today. The following steps in the modeling/rendering process will be adding lights and materials to the building. As long as I consistently work on this challenge every day, significant progress will be made.
Looking forward to the next post!