Cathedral and crypts, isometric

[Djekspek]

Looking very good RE! Been meddling with pure-ISO and visibility lately as well a bit. It's kinda hard with muti-levels, and my way is still to layout the dungeon in a way that I have no (or almost no) overlap between levels (which reduces layout-out possibilities dramatically of course ). As for walls and visibility I think you're on the right track. The wireframes of the arches look pretty cool this way. Maybe you can use some glass material to show them with some opacity in sketchup (never worked with glass materials myself though). Getting good shades is also hard using sketchup. Normally you'd have small, multiple lightsources in a dungeon. Currently your shades are very long, maybe you could get the lightsource up higher to increase the effect of a dungeon with ceilings... (I think sketchup does not support multiple lightsources but Im not sure) or maybe post-process shades in PS (would look the best I guess but also would take a lot of time ) Also maybe possible to load the model in another 3d-tool and add light sources. Also actual rendering in sketchup is pretty bad so using another finishing tool may be a way (I know architects use sketch-up a lot for mockups and then load this in 'real' modellers to do the rendering)..... well, just my thoughts... cheers!

[RecklessEnthusiasm]

Djekspek - Thanks a bunch, my man! Your ISO dungeon was a huge inspiration and made me think this was worth trying! I agree that multiple levels can be tricky, but they are also part of the beauty of isometric maps, I think. I considered using slightly transparent materials, but I think when all is said and done, it looks cleaner to have 'cut out' bits, like in your dungeon. I think I might have figured out some tricks for doing post-render shades in PS, too: you can output a separate image with the shadows alone on it, and then apply things like gaussian blur and fill in other areas, set it as a 'multiply' layer. I also just discovered that you can 'paint' an object with a simple transparent .png image as the material and it will be transparent but still cast shadows--A near 'glitch' that will allow for more consistent lighting with roofs that are 'there' but not there. I am still looking into other plugins for adding multiple light sources (and hopefully soft lights): I'll post if I can find a free one.

All in all, I am loving Sketchup. Definitely preferable to graph paper.