HA!   http://www.medievalworlds.com/
Different time period, but a very interesting site. I didn't know about it before.

you should look at svenart's gallery - you'll be amazed!

Attached Link: Kerkythea for SketchUp

WARNING: MLT rendering is computationally expensive. The results are very nice though.

thanks very much, i will download this - might be that i have questions later.
"You'd also have to get the renderer itself, I believe" - this is something i don't quite understand to start with.

• i downloade the pdf tutorial - will check that out first.

the above image is a model to show i am working on it - not ready by a long shot :-)
as the pan tiles texture was not to my liking i drew realistic pan tiles. if i use them for the final image, with all the tiles on the roof i think the rendering takes lots of time. with some tweaking and the right lighting i think however that it will look fine.

Quote - ...if i use them for the final image, with all the tiles on the roof i think the rendering takes lots of time...

Yeah, that's what I meant about the computationally expensive warning; and also some of the comments I made in that PM I sent to you.
The overall quality level (and especially the quality of lighting) in a Kerkythea render is very high. There is always the trade off of quality to render time in CG. No way around it. It's simply: # of calculations divided calculations/second.
Some engines are more efficient; but it's never a huge difference; quality settings being equal.  A quicker engine will make worse renders, but a lot of times max. quality isn't needed. Kerkythea doesn't have much in the way of making low quality renders, like most of the 'speed renderers' do.

I'll look around, see if I can find some other quicker render engines that you could use for your Sketch Up models too.

I haven't given up on working on this idea here in the thread. I'm just going through a motovational dearth right now w/ CG.

don't worry, this one works well for me - i know how much trouble sketchup has if i uses these pantiles :lol: it slows down so much that it is almost impossible to work on.
i know these pantiles are very greedy. i drew 3 different ones in a way to be able to put them together to get a whole roof, just to get the end result as in real life and that, as i already suspected, takes a lot of computing. there must be better textures for pan tiles, which i will find or try to make myself. i downloaded a little free prog (texturestudio) which makes it possible to make seamless tiles from parts of photographs, including compensating for the perspectived distortion.

I already looked around some for renderers :)
All the ones I found were much like the Kerkythea engine. Didn't find any quickies.

I had to look up 'pan tiles'.
If you are making the tiles as individual pieces and then copying them. It the number of polygons that is the trouble. The normal way to do that without killing render time is called 'cloning', or 'instancing'. Kerkythea doesn't do that, it can copy models and primitives but they are copies, not clones.

Another alternative is to use displacment and/or normal maps on a lower polygon surface to make the shapes. The Kerkythea can use normal maps. You would have to learn to use an application that can create the normal maps. Blender (http://www.blender.org) can do this and is free. Takes a bit of practice to get them right. Blender is a tough app. to learn also; but very powerful.

The third alternative is to use Bump (height) maps on a surface. It will look realistic from certain angles but not from a profile view. Kerkythea (and really any render engine) uses those too. This is the fastest rendering method; and therefore it is the most inaccurate method.
It is a greyscaled image (.jpg, .bmp, etc.) with white being the highest point and black the lowest.

Tip: For a better view when trying new materials out in Kerkythea. Material Editor -> 'Settings' tab: check the box labelled "Use model shape in preview" then the thumbnail will use the model instead of a sphere for that material.

have to digest all this, sounds very complicated to my amateur ears - will be back later, thanks for the info.

Sorry, I don't mean to keep bombarding with all these technical things. I can't help myself :biggrin:

I'd say that if you are going for quicker renders, the Bump Map approach would be both the easiest to pick up and the quickest rendering.

don't appologise, i don't mind - just learning a lot and i am not in a hurry.
with two free progs i have always difficulties installing: 1. gimp 2. blender - whatever i do, there always seems to be someting missing or so and i can't get it working properly - getting messages i don't understand - must be my fault but it happens every time (with my previous computer it was the same) so i gave up on these two.

I'd put some procedural noise into the yellow and the green, to break up the solid color.
You want to render glass?
Good Glass is VERY render intensive (takes a long time to render). It  has reflection, refraction, and produces caustics. Any one of those takes some time to render, all three in one material...:scared:

I never got GIMP to install right either. I gave up. I was using an antique Paint Shop Pro for a while, then I bought a new computer and it had PhotoShopCS on it.
Have you ever looked at ProjectDogWaffle? That is supposed to be pretty good free image editor.
http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/free/

the colours and textures are not definitive - they are just something to work with trying to master the technique.
i have project dogwaffle too, but mostly i use zoner draw, xara xtreme, photofiltre, artrage, artweaver and inkscape together with some viewers like irfan view.
i am so glad i am not the only one who has those problems with the gimp, i more or less felt like an idiot that it did not work properly.

Any progress?
Anybody?

I'm going to get back into this, hopefully next weekend will bring some free time for me.
I don't think I'll do too much, if I am the only one still interested in it.

Cool. :)
When I get time to do more than drop in to the forum for a few mins.
I'll pick out some other part of the drawing and work on that.

Looking good. :)

Found this while surfin'
http://sketchuptips.blogspot.com/search/label/plugin
Go down to the 'Wavefront .obj Exporter'. It's supposed to export .obj from SketchUp. No groups or textures; but you can apparently get the models out as .objs, which can be used by practically any 3d app.

I also talked to a Kerkythea developer and was assured that they are making an instancing module that will be released shortly, hopefully with the next release of the renderer. Looks like you will be able to use those poly greedy pan tiles before too long (whenever there is a new kt version available) with no problems.
There was a last minute bug discovery that prevented instancing from making the 2007 version.

thanks for all your help - this way i'm learning fast.

That's a nice tile texture there. I'm personally not so good at texturing.

don't know if i am, just tried and practised patience :lol:

I'm still interested - But real life is just so knackering right now, I get up V early, take 3 trains into London, work till I drop, then I have to take 3 trains back again, getting home about 9pm, eat, shower, fall on the bed, and hey, it's morning again... but tomorrow is the last day, so then I'm back to college for a week and a half before I can upload anything, but I'll see what I can get done in the time.

don't worry - there is nobody pushing! it's for fun (and possibly learning in the meantime).
no deadlines - no obligations - no pressure - get enough sleep and take some time to relax.

nothing is finished yet, but this way it starts looking like a town

That gate is a nice addition. Lots of detailing on it.
I'm a big fan of classical architecture!

Unfortunately I'm now off sick.  We were just leaving for the station yesterday morning when I had a lancing pain through my lower back.  Everything stopped, we came back indoors and as my husband had only got up that early to take me to the station in time... we both fell on the bed... me, very very carefully.

I'm now off from college until at least Monday, and although I can't sit, lie down or stand for long at a time, at least it doesn't seem to be getting any worse.  I think I caught it in time, but it would be nice if someone got those two large women to stop standing on my back!

I may - if I'm careful to only do a little at a time - get some modelling done. 

Don't you just hate 'real life'?

(real) life can be a bugger be glad there there are mobile computers! hope your back pain will disapear soon - take care!

Okay, finally got something to show you guys,

Here's a front and back view of the mill, this is an amalgamation of two or 3 Dutch mills, as I couldn't find one mill with all round views and frankly just finding any views of the back of a mill has a really hard job.

But here it is, fully textured.

Now obviously the footprint of a mill is an odd shape that probably wouldn't fit into a standard house shape, but the solution to that is - give it a concrete yard to sit in.

Is this any good for you guys?

fran, you did a great job on this mill, i love it!l! as for placing it, that's no problem at all. these mills need quite a lot of space around them to catch enough wind. as we have a harbour along the river this mill can be placed somewhere with that space around it, it even fits in quite well. if you want i can draw it in on the plan.
there is just one little thing: the hood (the part where the sails are attached) is made of wood, but i am sure that will be no problem at all.

Attached Link: Amstel Mill Image Location

I know the cap/hood is made of wood, both it and the main body are textured as if covered with roofing felt in my version, which is the closest I could come to getting it to look like the image I found of the Amstel Mill - which may be covered with roofing felt... or may even be thatched, but the photo is so fuzzy it's hard to tell, and anyway I don't as yet have any photos of thatch, so can't try that out as a texture... yet.
This image shows one view of the Amstel mill, and you can (just) see that the hood is covered in the same material as the main body., My mill is not an exact copy of this mill as I could not find any images showing the back of this one, so there I've used images of another mill from Flickr.com

Oh and I have a texture of cobbles, but mine are taken at my college - and they are shaped cobbles, sort of cross shaped.  But certainly pretty old as they are crumbling here and there.
I've uploaded this texture to freebies.

@koosievantutte
CGTextures has paving tiles like that. They are in the 'Bricks' section, I think,...in 'Floors' part.
Read the site's license: Everything on the site is free to use for any kind of CG work. All very high quality (probably need shrunken some, for memory conservation.)
http://www.cgtextures.com/

@FranOnTheEdge
Your mill looks great. Good job.

@dvlenk6 - thanks - here are exactly the kind of images i need for the streets!

@fran - mills are  thatched, roofing felt is never used - for textures of thatched surfaces see the site dvlenk6 mentioned - i saw a lot of good ones there. it is best to take a dark texture and it has to go from the top to the bottom.
don't worry about the back of mills - they are exactly the same as the front.
if there is something you need to know about mills, ask me, almost everything can be found if you search dutch sites, which will be difficult for you, of course.

• could you give me the dimensions of the mill so that i can make a kind of hill to put it on? there has to be quite some free space around it because of the sails.

"don't worry about the back of mills - they are exactly the same as the front."

Er... not from the images I've been able to find, the mechanics make sure of that.

At the front is where the sails are attached, and at the back is where the big beams are attached for turning the mill's cap/hood.

"if there is something you need to know about mills, ask me, almost everything can be found if you search dutch sites, which will be difficult for you, of course."

Oh, did you want something different?

"- could you give me the dimensions of the mill so that i can make a kind of hill to put it on? there has to be quite some free space around it because of the sails."

Um...... I dunno, I made it in Wings3D and imported it to Bryce for texturing, Bryce doesn't have any units that I can see, apart from in the Attributes, but basically you just re-size stuff as required by hand...

In Attributes it says it's: X= 78.18    Y= 172.06     Z= 162.25
Does that help any?

In Wings... I can't find any means for measurements for the whole thing...

P.S. I just tried the thatch textures from that CGTextures site, and unfortunately the two best for this purpose - i.e. the smoothest images - are not correctly tiled, and the darker one is the worst, - it produces definite dark bands across the texture, looking most odd on a model.

I hope to be able to take some photos of thatch myself in a few weeks, then we'll see.  There's a thatcher working quite near here, he might have some samples to show prospective customers.

Wings runs off 'units', not feet or meters per se. just units. The scale will remain intact when the object gets rescaled to fit into the overall project.

Quote - In Wings... I can't find any means for measurements for the whole thing...

Select the entire model (all objects)
Right-Click -> Absolute Commands -> Scale (right-click on 'scale')
That will show you the absolute x,y,z dimensions of the object(s), to 6 decimal places.

They should be very close to the Bryce units...or half, 1/4, 1/10, whatever. Meaning if the object is in Wings: 1 unit on the x-axis, 2 units on the y-axis, 3 units on the z-axis. It should be really close to that same proportion in Bryce, or any other app. It might 10,20,30 or 100,200,300 or whatever; depending on Export/Import scale; but the overall dimensional ratios should remain very very close to the same.

I was just going by the shape and the textures. The wood in particular looks really good; like it's been there for ages. I like the modelling on the arms too.
I wouldn't know a correct Dutch Windmill if it snuck up and bit me on the ass. :lol:
I have a cat that likes to do that, BTW ^^
Scares the hell out of you when you're gettng out of the shower...

i've tried both out on the mill, and I'm not sure which looks best - tell me what you think...

I've also just created a nice lichen brick texture from a photo I took a few weeks back and I tried that on the brick base of the more distant mill - what do you think of that?

Oh, the closer Mill has the ligher thatch... er, as you can see...

You know, (thinks...) it doesn't really look much like the original mill, the Amstel one, that thatch looks wrong somehow.  But maybe I'm just trying to match the original photo too much....

a) it looks closer to the original photo of Amstel Mill, and

b) it also looks more like the colour I've seen old thatch go after many years of weathering.

I didn't change the texture on the hoods, so you can see the difference in tone between old and new.

Right, thas enough of texturing, what can I model next? 

Hey koosiefantootie, have you got any decent detailed images of the front and back of any buildings we need?

Quote - Wings runs off 'units', not feet or meters per se. just units. The scale will remain intact when the object gets rescaled to fit into the overall project.

Quote - In Wings... I can't find any means for measurements for the whole thing...

Select the entire model (all objects)
Right-Click -> Absolute Commands -> Scale (right-click on 'scale')
That will show you the absolute x,y,z dimensions of the object(s), to 6 decimal places.

Aha, thanks, so in there it says the windmill is....
x = 21.677891
y = 47.449588
z = 44.27658

Quote - They should be very close to the Bryce units...or half, 1/4, 1/10, whatever. Meaning if the object is in Wings: 1 unit on the x-axis, 2 units on the y-axis, 3 units on the z-axis. It should be really close to that same proportion in Bryce, or any other app. It might 10,20,30 or 100,200,300 or whatever; depending on Export/Import scale; but the overall dimensional ratios should remain very very close to the same.

Um... thing is, I can't now remember if I changed the size once I got it inside Bryce, I often do.

Quote - - - - - -
I was just going by the shape and the textures. The wood in particular looks really good; like it's been there for ages. I like the modelling on the arms too.

Thanks. The texture is from a photo of old weathered wood, which is why it looks ... like old weathered wood... ggg.  As for the arms, they are...well, sort of "from" the original image... of one of the windmills, not exact, just my interpretation.  The texture on the arms is from the grey weathered wood boarding on Cobham Mill - so mill-ish. Lol!

Quote - I wouldn't know a correct Dutch Windmill if it snuck up and bit me on the ass. :lol:
I have a cat that likes to do that, BTW ^^
Scares the hell out of you when you're gettng out of the shower...

gee, sounds like some athletic cat!  ROFL!

Dear koosievantutte, please excuse my earlier mis-spelling of your name - I've been at the red wine.

the light one in the last image looks the most natural to me.

when you still want details of the hood - here is an image of it, front and back - i used these because they are quite clear because they were taken from a delapidated mill which has since be restored, i think this gives all the detail.

here two drawings with details. (the big image is clear)

and oh, yeah, the units are a mystery to me - in sketchup i use real-world-measures

koosie

as for buildings we need: i have some good ones - will sort some out - it might be a good idea to look at the row of buildings i posted before and look what you like - i can get more details of that type of house with dimensions for you to work with.

That's a very fine windmill Fran! I like the textures too.

Seems that scaling might be more an issue than I thought at first. I should've known that from the start; WTH was I thinking?:blink:

Scale (for Fran):
A model, exported from Wings with the export scale set to 1.0 is identical in units when imported into MAX at vertex scale = 1.0
They work in the same scale, meters. 1 Wings unit = 1 MAX unit = 1 Meter. Simple enough.

A 2m cube (2 wings units) in Bryce 6 is 20.89 x 20.89 x 20.89 Bryce Units.
The same box, exported from Bryce 6 and imported into MAX is 2m.
There is no scaling done when importing or exporting from Bryce. If you don't change the scale in Bryce, it is no issue.
Bryce material -> MAX shader is another story altogether...

For reference:
M3 is 1.851 m tall.
V3 is 1.797 m tall, she's a big girl ;)
I'm deriving those figures from exporting the chars. out of D|S with MAX scaling (meters).

@Koosievantutte
Have you tried exporting from SU with that object exporter?
Try it out please!
Send me a 1m x 1m x 1m cube, or something similar, so I can import that into MAX and see what happens with the scaling.
Throw some kind of material on it also. We'll see what parts of that are lost in the export/import process.
I will send you my email address in a PM so that you can email it to me directly. I don't see any option in the PMs for attaching a file.