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SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization: Retweet and Win a Free Copy

As regular readers will know we are big fans of Google SketchUp here at digital urban. From its ability to export to game engines such as Unity through to its integration with Google Building Maker, SketchUp has become our one stop shop for urban modelling. To get the most out of SketchUp it is well worth sitting back and going through one of the many tutorial books and ‘SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization’ by Roben de Jongh is one of the best out there.

Normally we are slightly skeptical about tutorial books, after all most tutorials can now be found online but Robin provides a unique step by step guide that provides an essential skill set. For example, Chapter 4 details how to model ridge tiles, that is not something your easily come across online and that alone makes the book a must buy.

Here is a brief summary of what each chapter covers:

Chapter 1: Quickstart Tutorial – Photo Real Gallery Scene – This chapter is an immediate fix for those who are impatient to get photo-realistic rendered SketchUp scenes. Straight away you will learn how to model the gallery scene, fix up lighting, add materials, add a photo background, and finally render in Kerkythea.

Chapter 2: Plug in and Gear Up – Did you know that by downloading a few free plugins and other software you can turn SketchUp into a free fully functional 3D visualization and animation suite similar to high end commercial software? Follow this chapter to obtain all the goodies.

Chapter 3: Composing the Scene – In this chapter you will learn how to take the hard work out of modeling by setting up your scenes prior to starting work. You will learn how to start from CAD plans, site images, or Google Earth and build the scene optimized for quick rendering or animation later.

Chapter 4: Modeling for Visualization – SketchUp is so easy to use that we’re tempted to jump right in and model everything. But this can lead to ineffective presentation later and large polygon counts, which slow the computer. This chapter leads through some of the professional modeling methods you need to learn to save you time and hassle, and to make photo-real rendering a cinch.

Chapter 5: Doing It Up (How to Apply Materials and Photo-textures) – Most visualizers are crazy enough to use the materials bundled with rendering software. But this methodology was developed during the ice age! Now that we all have digital cameras and access to unlimited free online image resources, we have a far more effective way of “dressing” the model. The tutorials in this chapter show you how to use SketchUp’s unique photo and material handling tools to create ultra-real textured models mega easily.

Chapter 6: People, Trees, Furniture, and Things – Now that you’ve created the scene, modeled the buildings, and applied materials, you can add life to the scene with Entourage. Learn how to find the best free people, foliage, vehicles, and furniture online, and better still learn how to easily create your own with the foolproof methods in this chapter. In no time you’ll be able to build up a comprehensive library to use or give/sell to others.

Chapter 7: Artistic Techniques – Exporting images from SketchUp is not the end of the process. Combining several image layers in GIMP, a powerful free photo editing suite, you will learn how to simulate sketchy pencil and watercolor styles. Fans of these methods will be pleased to know the famous Dennis Technique is presented in this chapter along with Dennis’s own creations.

Chapter 8: Photo-realistic Rendering – Here the amazing Kerkythea introduced in Chapter 1 and 2 is explored in more depth, giving you the skills and confidence to tackle any rendering project. A hassle-free method of working is introduced along with proven best settings for test renders and final outdoor and indoor scenes. This chapter covers everything you need to get professional photo-realistic renders from your SketchUp model that you’ll be personally amazed with.

Chapter 9: Image Compositing and After-effects – The rendering process isn’t the end of the line, because there are lots of subtle but important after-effects you can apply to make the image even more effective. This chapter covers how to add reflections without rendering, creating depth of field effects from a depth render, adjusting levels for realistic daylight scenes, and compositing real and rendered images.

Chapter 10: Animated Flyovers and Walkthroughs – The crowning glory of your visualization project is likely to be a rendered or artistic-style animation. The tutorials in this chapter will take you through this step by step, showing you how to create storyboards, set up cameras and paths in SketchUp with extra plugin functionality, export test animations and final renders. Photo-real animations are then composited to make a simple show reel.

Chapter 11: Combining It All in Layout – Layout is bundled as part of SketchUp Pro and is introduced in this final chapter for those who wish to explore the free trial before committing to Pro. You will learn how to bring together SketchUp models and artistic or rendered output into a screen presentation or printed portfolio, adding borders, text and dimensions.

The good news is that the nice people at Packt Publishing have provided us with 3 copies to give away. All you need to do is retweet this post and we will pick 3 random twitter users by 12 Noon Monday 10th January, each will receive a copy of the book. The competition is open to anyone in the world, yep we will ship it out free of charge next week.

You can buy the book direct from Packt or of course online via Amazon…

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London Twitter Network Map

Fabian Neuhaus author of Urban Tick here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London has kindly agreed to write a guest post on the London Twitter network, the zoomable version embedded below is particularly notable:

Following up from the New City Landscape maps, where we mapped tweet densities in urban areas around the world, we have now started to look into the socia network aspects of this data set. As a complementary graph to the map the network illustrates how the twitter users are connected through their activities and usage of the platform.

Graph by urbanTick / The London NCL Social Network graph of twitter users. The dataset is defined as geolocated tweets collected over the period of one week in the urban area of London set to a 30 km radius. Click on the image for a larger version on flickr or see the interactive zoomable version HERE.

The network is built from nodes and edges, were the nodes are the twitter users active during the time period of message collection back in May 2010. The edges visualise the connections between these users. From the messages sent connections are established based on activity and interaction. In reality these are the @ messages that are directed at one or more particular user. The second indicator of a connection are the RT messages, the message that have been retweeted by followers of the creator of the initial message.

Graph by urbanTick / Zoom of the London NCL Social Network graph of twitter users. The dataset is defined as geolocated tweets collected over the period of one week in the urban area of London set to a 30 km radius. Click for a larger version on flickr.

Using these two methods the network graph is established as a directed network, meaning that the connection between the nodes has a direction since a message originates from a sender being delivered to a receiver.

The resulting network is built from a total of 17618 nodes and 26445 edges. In the case of this London twitter network not everyone is connected to everyone and about 5400 subnetworks were identified. Furthermore via the colouring the modularity of the network is visualised. Each subgroups has a unique colour shading indicating groups with tighter connections.

London NCL Social Network

Graph by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / London NCL Socia Network - Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top left corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Click HERE for a full screen view.

The sizing of the nodes is derived from the number of connections this particular node has for both incoming and outgoing edges.

For the comparison of the networks we are currently working on graphing out the whole range of NCL across the world in order to establish a analysis parameter set. We’ll keep you posted about the progress here.

To compare it, the geolocated London New City Landscape map. It is important to keep in mind that the graphs are not spatially representative as compared to the NCL maps which are properly geolocated.

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / London New City Landscape Click HERE for a full screen view.

Post by Fabian Neuhaus, Urban Tick.

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Wired Big Ideas for 2011: Chatitecture – Talking Buildings

We are pleased to say that in at number 24 of Wired Magazines ‘Big Ideas for 2011′ is Chatitecture, part of the Tales of Things project. Over the past 8 months a group of us have been developing technology to allow buildings to ‘talk’, to communicate their history, their architecture and the stories of people passing through.

Its simple to do, just sign up with Tales of Things, upload a image of your building of choice (under 2mb) and add a story. Your building will then go live and your be able to add it to the architecture group. If you want you can also print out a QRCode that you can stick to the building allowing anyone to scan the code and add to the story/history of the building via the free iPhone/Android apps.

Your building will also be able to ‘Tweet’ everytime it is scanned or a new comment/story added, it will also become part of the ‘World of Things’ map – a place to view all the objects added so far to the site.

The project team are working on ways to make the objects more location aware and aware of near by objects, it could be interesting over the next few months to see how this develops.

You can start tagging anything and everything via talesofthings.com

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Festival Taiwan 2010 Viz

The Festival Taiwan 2010 / Official Spot film investigates the genesis of a world created from information where success and failure becomes layered into an evolving urban landscape:

404 Festival Taiwan 2010 / Official Spot from 404 Festival on Vimeo.

Created by Nice Shoes, and in their own words – the city is not designed through intentional desires, but rather by the proliferation of ideas and thus equating failure with success, each becomes their own thread in a tapestry of an evolving construct.

We are not sure what that means either, but the visualisation is impressive as is the soundscape created for the clip. We do not often delve into sound here at digital urban, but this clip needs headphones, the spatial separation and mix are notable.

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Architectural Viz: Transitions between Real and Virtual, Shopping City Sued

Produced by Telegram71 and commisioned by Atp Architekten Ingenieure, the video below shows a possible future renovation of the Shopping City Sued, a shopping mall extending for nearly 2 km in the periphery of Vienna. The insertion of 3d modeled and rendered sequences into on site shootings gives a clear idea of the transition between the actual stage and the future development:

Central to the visualisation are the transitions between real world and rendered, we especially like the staircase sequence 3 minutes into the clip. Its not easy to make a clip based around a shopping centre interesting, but Telegram71 seem to of pulled it off.

Head over to http://www.telegram71.com/ for more examples.