Currently I am practicing with Sketchup and Enscape.
My aim is to model existing situations and then planned situations to help clients in their decision making. Below some of my first tries. I really could use some advice in making these look (even) more realistic. Please note I am not an architect but will be visualizing designs made by others. So please look only at making these shots more photorealistic. I have played with textures (incl. bump mapping), lighting etc.
Some things I ran into for example. How do I get a whiter ceiling in the office situation without making the material self-luminous (which looks weird)? Where can I obtain good 3D models of people? The ones in Sketchup Warehouse are mostly inappropriate. Sometimes there just seems to be missing something. But what?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Some things that I have found that help:
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lights: don’t just rely on lighting the room with ‘natural’ daylight. As soon as you have a window or opening that you can see the sky through, the auto-exposure compensates and everything goes dark. Put in lights as you would actually have them in the space- pendant lights, ceiling spots, striplights, etc. (Personally I would avoid using ‘filler lighting’ where you have a generic ‘invisible’ light source to illuminate areas in shadow - if it’s in shadow, then it’s in shadow; add a proper light or a desk lamp etc.)
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details & trims: put in skirting boards, architrave, window cills, coving, etc for domestic properties. Put in electric points, conduit, ceiling tiles, ventilation grills etc. A key to this is actually looking at existing buildings whenever you are out & about… or looking at estate agent’s portfolios.
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material orientation: (esp. wood grains) to save clogging up the materials library, use SU’s edit texture to do things like rotating the texture to match the orientation of the object it’s covering.
Note that this may involve every element in a group being filled with the default texture, then filling the group with x: if all the textures are the wrong orientation, then change the axis of the group. If one face is the wrong orientation then edit the group, fill that surface, then edit texture on it, r-click and rotate 90.
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material bumps: to give more randomness and a ‘natural’ feel to certain surfaces like leaves, gravel, stone, etc. don’t use the same albedo texture for a bump map; change it to something else.
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flat material textures: just about every plain surface contains imperfections in reality - smudges, finger prints, scratches, etc. - anything too perfect does not look real. You can add a surface texture and use enscape’s object fade to make it a subtle variation. Or add a slight noise map for a shine. Or have a very slight bump on the surface. Note that you may have to check the ‘explicit object size’ for images other than the albedo.
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lived in: add props and a little bit of untidiness to a scene; coffee cups, pens, papers, magazines, toys, etc. And never make them perfectly straight or line up with an edge. Similarly, chairs need to be off-set, perhaps with one looking like someone has just vacated it. A bit more tricky, but adding wrinkles to materials like rugs, beds, table covers, curtains, etc. makes them much more believable.
