Redevelopment of Place Van Zeeland, Belgium - Google SketchUp Workshop: Modeling, Visualizing, and Illustrating - page 77

Stage 4: Rendering Scenes in Kerkythea

Objectives : Preparing the scenes and the animation path for export into
Kerkythea
Data : Color swatch chart based on the materials used in the project
Tools : SketchUp and Kerkythea

FiG 4.21 SketchUp's shadow settings
palette.

For the Place Van Zeeland project, a simplified
color swatch chart was chosen based on a unified
range of colors. The level of detail in the project
did not justify the use of more realistic textures;
furthermore, photorealism was never the goal of
this model.

Scenes were created in SketchUp that corre-
sponded to particular views that we wanted
to render in Kerkythea. Features like the time
of year, day, and shadows were then defined
by clicking on the Shadow Settings icon
(see Fig. 4.21). For specifying shadow settings on
the Mac, from the Menu Bar choose Window >
Shadows. Once all these parameters were set, the
scene was added to the Scenes palette by click-
ing on the “+” button.

Once all the various scenes were created, the model
was sent down the pipeline to Kerkythea by click-
ing on the Export Model to Kerkythea icon. In
the dialog box that appears, click on YES to
choose the options Exported Geometry and
Export Lights. You should choose NO for all the
other options, and then click OK. Now it is just
a question of choosing an appropriate filename
and clicking on the Save option. Once the export
process is complete, the model can be opened
directly in Kerkythea.

FiG 4.22 Kerkythea's dialog box for
rapid rendering setup.

Rendering can now be started directly: From the
Menu Bar, choose Render > Start. Parameters can
also be set from the Camera and Settings window.
For the Place Van Zeeland renders, the Ambient
Occlusion setting was chosen, since this gives a
good approximation of radiosity without the time
and calculation overheads.

Kerkythea offers many more advanced photorealistic rendering possibilities,
should you need them. It can also be used for the creation of walk-through ani-
mations: Kerkythea simply takes the scenes that are stored in the imported file
and uses them as keyframes, “tweening” all the intermediate frames as necessary.