LJN Blog Posts

Hi Folks

A bit later than promised, I know, but I’ve now just completed reading all of SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualisation: Beginner’s Guide’s 408 pages from cover to cover and there’s so much fantastic information contained within it that it took me a little longer than expected!

Anyway, on with my review of this book/ebook as promised.

First of all, let me say that this book is rammed with links to websites/FREE computer software and detailed work-flows that are best followed with your computer switched on and preferably with a “live” design/visualisation project to work on to witness the results first hand. I didn’t do any of this and just read the book and imagined the results with my existing knowledge of SketchUp and the other FREE software mentioned.

Secondly, as the title suggests, this book is not primarily aimed at Garden/Landscape Designers per see and there may be some content contained within the book that you might not think is relevant to our industry, however, the majority of it is and I think that anyone who reads this book with a basic understanding of SketchUp’s capabilities will truly be amazed at how this program can be extended though “plugins” and interacts with other related FREE design software such as Kerkythea (renderer) and “The Gimp” (Photoshop clone) to form a top class professional design suite to challenge any high-end (bought) competitors.

As this book is so weighty and contains so much information, I’m not going to attempt to review the contents of each it’s 11 chapters but, instead, will try and give you a condensed insight of what’s covered.

Chapter 1 is a great start for all impatient designers/visualisers (like me !) and jumps straight in at the deep end and guides the reader through the process of modelling a room scene (a gallery), texturing it, adding lighting and rendering it in Kerkythea to produce a photorealistic image.

The next chapter then directs you to all the relevant websites where the FREE supporting software can be downloaded.

The following early chapters of the book tell you how to do the basics right in a methodical/organised way without wasting any time/money. The author of the book, Robin De Jongh, is a professional, UK based architectural designer/visualiser and knows SketchUp, Kerkythea and The Gimp inside out and has his work-flow down to a tee so that at no stage in the process is time/output wasted.

He effortlessly explains how site information can be “sucked” from various sources e.g. Digital Photographs, CAD files, Google Earth, Google StreetView and SketchUp’s “Photo Match” facility to quickly produce accurate, geo-located SketchUp models with realistic shadows and photo-real backgrounds.

Also covered are ways to “flesh out” your model and populate it within SketchUp using ready made components from Google’s 3D Warehouse or within Kerkythea using 3D objects originally produced to be used with the “high end” 3D Studiomax program. Importantly, for us Landscape specialists, the importance of not over-populating your models with “memory hungry” 3D trees/shrubs is stressed and methods for producing homemade 2D “face me” trees is described as well as mentioning the use of the computer landscape program “Vue”.

Chapter 7, I believe, finally answers the age old “hand-drawn v CAD” argument – in favour of CAD! Robin introduces us to “The Dennis Technique” which is none other than a simple technique using SketchUp and Gimp that produces professional looking “artist’s impressions” which look like they have been pencil/ink drawn then painted with a watercolour wash.

An organised approach to producing “photo realistic” renders using SketchUp and Kerkythea is detailed in the next chapter and methods of “tweaking” these rendered images in Gimp follow in chapter 9.

Reading chapter 10 will turn you in to a budding Martin Scorsese! Robin describes how you should start with storyboards to plan your SketchUp animations/walk-throughs and progress from simple low-resolution movies through to a sleek high res final presentation. During the process, no output is wasted enabling the production of video of varying quality from You Tube standard through to DVD and TV quality.

The final chapter introduces SketchUp’s sister program “Layout” which comes free with the Pro version and is desktop publishing software which allows you to compose stunning printable drawings using your SketchUp model scenes, “artistic impressions”, photo-real render images and Layout’s own 2D graphic symbols such as plan trees, North arrows, scale bars, people, vehicles as well as text etc.

Overall, to sum it all up, this book has been written by an author who knows his stuff and has a sense of humour! To the un-initiated, the technical jargon used sometimes and the very structured approach to working may be off-putting to some but the author always explains “what has just happened” later in plain English. This book is no “quick fix” for the impatient/occasional user of SketchUp, but for serious/regular users of this amazing software it tells you everything you ever wanted/need to know about using it to produce professional standard architectural/landscape visualisations.

In short, a “must have” book packed with a lifetime’s knowledge that will take several readings to take it all in.

SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualisation: Beginner’s guide is by author Robin De Jongh and can be purchased now directly from PACKT Publishing as a traditional book or ebook.

Reviewed February 2011 by:

David Beasley