Google SketchUp to Maxwell Render Workflow Tutorials
Plug-in Workflow Introduction / SketchUp Integration Philosophy
Subtitles of the Movie (Google SketchUp to Maxwell Render Workflow / Plug-in Workflow Introduction / SketchUp Integration Philosophy)
So as promised, I'm going to take a little time now to talk about the SketchUp Integration Philosophy for the Maxwell Plug-in. The main philosophy is a WYSIWYG or what you see is what you get design philosophy. And while you know the idea of what you see is what you get is really appealing, one has to take a certain amount of grain of salt with that particular philosophy here because SketchUp tends to have a very flat rendered look that is reminiscent of illustrations and hand-drawn artwork. And Maxwell is on the far, far stream of photorealism, and so they really don't have that much in common particularly when it comes to materials. However, we can get a very nice, what you see is what you get approach, from Maxwell right of the box with SketchUp. And so I'm going to do a few things really quickly to establish a, what you see is what you get, of this particular scene as far as Maxwell's interpretation. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and Launch our Shadows, and I'm just going to Move the Shadow Sliders until I get something that appeals to me, maybe something, there we go, something like that on the Shadows. I'm going to go ahead and Launch the Scene Manager, which I haven't talked about and don't worry, you won't understand necessarily everything that I'm doing here, I'm just doing it so that we actually have something to look at. I'm going to go ahead and Turn On the Bottom and I'm going to Set the Mode for Application and then I'm going to go ahead and grab our Focal Depth and I'm just going to click on Susan there and I'm going to hit Render. And we're just going to Overwrite our Previous Untitled Document, and there we go. So that's what you see is what you get, now you can see that the Shadows from SketchUp are in exactly the same place in Maxwell. You can see that we have Susan, and we have the green ground plane from Maxwell, and our exposure is a little bit heavy right now but if I Reduce the Exposure like so and we wait for the update which will be in just a second, you'll see that we have a sky back here that has a sky gradation as well. So this, what you see is what you get design philosophy is pretty apparent. I'm going to go ahead and hit Stop, close this guy out, so like I say, what you see is what you get, with a certain amount of fudge factor. Now, one of the fudge factors is you will not get the edges from SketchUp, and so if you want to get a better view of what's going on here, go to Edge Style and Turn Off Edges and you can see immediately that looks a little bit more like that Maxwell Render did. The other thing that is not going to look necessarily 100 percent the same is our sky background and the reason why is because the Maxwell sky is based on a physical parameter set that is very closely aligned to a natural sky, whereas in the SketchUp sky we don't see that. So I'll give you an example, I'm going to go ahead and reduce the time of day here, so that it's really, really early like so, now you can see the nice long shadows, it's early in the morning but we still see this bright, blue sky behind us right? Well, let's go ahead and Render that in Maxwell and see what happens. So you see how everything is turned darker and darker, well let's just go ahead and hit Stop, Close that out and we'll just move that even more like so and we'll hit Render again. So you can see that that Physical Sky is actually changing very dramatically as we're working, however we're not able to see those changes in SketchUp. So that's an example of a what you see is what you get thing doesn't necessarily translate because yes we see the shadow and the geometry is all in the same place but we don't get that same color cast from the early morning light that we do in Maxwell. So, when I say, what you see is what you get has certain limitations between SketchUp and Maxwell, hopefully you get a better picture of what that's like.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Google SketchUp to Maxwell Render Workflow |
| Author: | Jason Maranto |
| SKU: | 34210 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-83-6 |
| Release Date: | 2011-03-22 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 82 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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