I haven't used C4D or Max so not sure about their workflow - integrated sounds good (more like mental ray or renderworks?)
I' m not sure how you would create render-ready components for sketchup given the material assigning process is so complicated.
Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but the sketchup workflow for rippled water is:
1) Apply a water-looking texture or colour within sketchup.
2) Open the Skindigo material browser. Type in Water to search (the browser only shows 30 types of material to start with, so we guess some keywords and see what comes up)/ I'll select "rippled water".
3) This loads into sketchup. It doesn't rename the SKM so it can be difficult to search for these later. But some settings are added to the material (I dont understand the settings but that's OK for now)
4) I render the scene. notice that the water looks OK, but there are no ripples. I need to figure out why -is the scale of my model wrong? Eventually I find the Shader Properties has some code I can edit to change the ripple sizes. Luckily somebody explained the code:
Code: Select all
def eval() real :
fbm(
getTexCoords(0) * 10.0, # The multiplier here controls the frequency of the waves.
3 # The number of noise octaves. More octaves = smaller waves.
) *
0.01 # This is the wave height in metres
5) I use trial to adjust the settings, rendering the scene several times until i get the waves looking OK.
6) Then I need to do this each time I render the model?? And remember those settings because they were applied in Indigo not in Sketchup threfore not saved?
So how would you make render-ready components that included water?
SketchUp users are not 3d artists, but they work in architecture, landscape design, civil engineering, product design, education, stage design, forensics, etc. Sketchup is designed to be fast & basic to make 3d models, but the economies of this are lost if it takes so long to get good render results.
My ideal (basic) material workflow would be (eg for water):
Select sketchup material (having already set transparency and scale in sketchup's material editor) then in Skindigo i use a dropdown menu to select material type "liquid" and adjust a "roughness" slider (or value) and maybe a "reflectivity" slider.
Why is it that crappy biased renderers seem to have very userfriendly interfaces, but the physically based renderers expect the modeler to learn physics and programming. Or am I just using the wrong rendering package?