15 - [Inner] The Ward of Erahum [Mouse]

[Mouse]

LOL!

Mouse has a whole 24 hr 'blonde moment'

(well... its more silver, nowadays, but hey)

Thank you so much, John

I've also discovered how to hide lines I can't heal, but I think it needs some left in around the crenulations for definition with this limestone texture

Practice 02.jpg

[Mouse]

I've also figured out how to import the basemap, scale it so that it matches the scale of the drawing, move it around so that the tower makes sense, adjust the shadows to match the lightray...

I have a feeling that if I carry on down this road there will come a point where my little laptop is going to fail, but I'm of a mind to push it and see how far I get before it becomes unworkable

If the worst happens I'll just export everything and carry on in GIMP.

John - is there a way of controlling the size of the export - to make it larger than this?

Sketchup Version 01.jpg

[J.Edward]

Oh, and you can change the color of the lines too
So, that may be a nice option for ya too.
If you have any sketchup questions, just ask me.
I used sketchup for years doing 3d stock modeling starting back around 2004-5 I think and onwards.

Also did texture and rendering through Vue so I can sometimes help with some questions for that too [maybe].

Edit - Just saw your question....

John - is there a way of controlling the size of the export - to make it larger than this?
Sketchup Version 01.jpg

There is, but I am not sure in the version you are using.
I have used a pro version since v1 so this may not be available in the free one....
It is Export 2D Graphic > options [down in bottom right corner] > and then you set the size [if that is available to you]
Clipboard02.jpg

[Mouse]

Thanks John I just hope you don't end up rueing the day you made that offer, since I may have quite a few. I found out how to edit the landscape mesh after watching a UTube video. The Sketchup help centre doesn't mention the fact that you have to explode the mesh before you can edit it - not where I was reading up about it anyway. Unfortunately I am still unable to model the landscape. That's not Sketchup, but my laptop that's at fault. 4 GB RAM and 4 processors just isn't enough to cope with it anything but the most simple mesh, and then I wonder just how many buildings I will be able to add on top of that burden before the project fails.

The problem I was having with Vue is that the heightmap I imported to 'paint' the terrain into existence causes artefacts that I just can't seem to get rid of. This render below is the entire area, but if you look close you will see the strange dark lines that indicate the original contours of the height map - transitions from one grey to the next. I painted and smoothed and painted and smoothed, but it doesn't make one iota of difference.

TOPO rendered.jpg

Blender - I learned how to import a bitmap image as a plane in Blender, and then use a deform modifier to turn that image (the same heightmap) into something similar to the Sketchup terrain model. The problem seems to be that there's a bug of some kind where the deform tool zooms into the centre of the map no matter what you do. So that was a dead loss for me, since I'm pretty dreadful at creating terrains in Blender by hand. I certainly can't do what Falconius can do! He's a Blender Wizard, whereas I'm just a mouse! LOL!

I think I might spend a few more days thinking and looking around at other alternatives. Whatever I do, I need to be able to model the landscape, since the shape of it affects the shadows in ways that I'd have no hope of being able to calculate otherwise - as with the wall on top of the ridge. I've considered Wilbur, but the landscape isn't really a fluvial one, and having full fluvial erosion on it would look wrong.

[ThomasR]

I hadn't taken a look at your wonderful thread in a while (sorry about that) and I'm really impressed by the direction you are taking

[Mouse]

Thanks Thomas

I think I might just have bitten off a bit more than my machine can chew with this dream of building a full 3D model! LOL!

John - I can export images up to 10,000 x 10,000 pixels now you have shown me how. Thanks

The bad news is that I can't even manipulate a Sketchup terrain mesh of just 100 x 100 metres

[Mouse]

John - I think I've solved the terrain problem now. Working with contours seems to be far less taxing for the system, so I'll invent some contours and work with them, instead of trying to mould the landscape from scratch.

Sketchup Version 01.jpg

I need to learn a lot more about the fine controls, but the thing I'm having most trouble with is drawing the actual contours. The freehand drawing tool in Sketchup tends to create rather jerky lines. Is there a way to draw or import Bezier curves?

None of the terrain stuff is going to end up as perfect as I would like, because I'm not importing it from Google Earth, but I can work with this in GIMP once I've built it all and rendered it out.

EDIT: how do you change the colour of the lines? I can't find it in the help section.

[J.Edward]

You can import lines from Illustrator and form other programs that can output vector lines as ... dxf? or dwg?... can't recall.
Lemme go check. Yeah.. i think that is right.
So, if you can use inkscape to create some terrain lines and then export form inkscape for dxf.. that can be imported. at least in my version.
The crappy thing is then having to select all those lines and move to their different heights.. not fun.

And as a note, you are making great progress at understanding and using sketchup

Edit - to change color of lines...edges, profiles....
go to styles
Clipboard03.jpg

[Mouse]

You can import lines from Illustrator and form other programs that can output vector lines as ... dxf? or dwg?... can't recall.
Lemme go check. Yeah.. i think that is right.
So, if you can use inkscape to create some terrain lines and then export form inkscape for dxf.. that can be imported. at least in my version.
The crappy thing is then having to select all those lines and move to their different heights.. not fun.

And as a note, you are making great progress at understanding and using sketchup

Thanks, John. I'm not finding it half as taxing learning Sketchup as I am GIMP or Blender. Vue also took me a long time to grasp properly, but I hit a wall with that since it doesn't allow any real modelling. Sketchup seem to understand that 'user friendly' goes a whole lot deeper than a standard list of menus, and their training vids are both excellent and totally free (which is sadly more than I can say for Blender these days).

Thank you so much for the style advice! I have lovely muddy grey lines now. They aren't half as distracting when you zoom out to view the whole model

Curves - I successfully created both a dxf and a dwg file of contour lines in my 20 yr old Corel programme - lovely and smooth they were... but on importing them not only had they been converted to straight segments, they were in lots of tiny individual pieces! LOL! Maybe pro is different, but I think I will carry on drawing my jerky contours in Sketchup, since at least the segments are all in one long string and can be moved in one go.

[kacey]

TOPO rendered.jpg

This looks really neat, I played around with sketchup for my city map as well but the interface is a little tricky on my Surface, it works but is a bit of a pain so I'm finding zbrush is the best so far on my tablet for 3D. I recently downloaded Vue as well but feel totally lost in it...I wish I could do what you've done here I'm a little envious of this picture. I know it's a bit of extra work, but if you decide to use this one and can't figure out those lines in you're 3D programme they can be easily removed in gimp after the fact with the healing brush.