The Material Dialog Box in SketchUp

SketchUp has tools and plugins that add a touch of reality to the design. The presentation of SketchUp distinguishes the application from others as it successfully brings the reality of 3D design to you. The material box, as the name defines, gives color effects to the design. Material dialog box appears differently in the windows and Mac versions.

To open the material dialog box: Windows > materials

Generally, two types of materials (colors and textures) are available in the SketchUp dialog box and you can apply either one as per your need.

Colors:

Solid colors are available in the dialog box and you cannot use the gradients. You can make the color of your choice.

Textures:

Texture in SketchUp is a small image that is applied to the face of your design until the face gets completely covered by the image. For example, if you want to design a brick face, you need to click the brick icon image several times to fill up the surface. There are many textures available in SketchUp, and they indeed add an interesting touch to the design. If the already existed list seems not enough, you can download more from Google SketchUp website. You can also download paid textures and can make your own format.

More about SketchUp materials:

• You can make the materials translucent by adjusting the opacity slider. This adds a clear visibility to your model in the Windows.
• Textures have transparent areas also that allow you to see through the faces you are texturing on. The black spaces on the texture may look inappropriate, but they come up with a wide range of benefits.
• You can also edit a material as per your choice. This is basically the work of the advanced designers and they know how to handle the materials properly to make a perfect 3D model.

• Photo texturing is another thing that will help you get the model as per your expectation. You can apply photos instead of colors and textures to cover the surfaces of your design. This feature brings in a new change in the work flow and pushes the limits. Those building models for Google earth will take benefits from this feature.

These are the few things about dialog box that make your designer easier and simpler. This feature gives your 3D design a complete sense.

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Published By

Rajib Dey

www.sketchup4architect.com

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The boundary of architectural visualization at Gensler

It is literary a global architecture, design and planning firm that has near about 44 branches and more than 5000 professionals and spread their network across Asia, Europe, Australia and the Middle East. The firm was founded by Mr. Arthur Gensler Jr. and Associates Inc., known as Gensler in 1965 at San Francisco and in recent they are been serving more than 3500 active clients in every industry. Gensler designers are aimed to renovate the places more inspiring, more consistent and more influenced where people live, work and play. Gensler is planned for supporting their clients all over the world at every step of design cycle from primary strategy and design planning through performance and management.

In this article we will come to know about the creative works and system and management about architectural visualization of Gensler from Scott DeWoody who is the creative media manager at Gensler and has the experience to work with countless clients such as NVIDIA Corporation, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil Company, BP, City Center Las Vegas and many more.

Scott’s Role at Gensler: As a creative media manager Scott has to manage the rendering workflows, supervise visualization technologies, give training to the newcomers, and work on documentation over several things and research and development into new technologies like VR/AR/MR etc. Lot of roles really for him, but this is not the last as he as to act as a consultant on a huge number of projects and find out the best solution for any problem that can appear.

As per the words of Scott, he and other employees can get really big possibilities of working with various kinds of clients and projects that provide them enough experience for being compatible in every field. Scott has been working in Gensler for 10 years and serving various kinds of clients everyday which give him lot of experience and knowledge and he enjoys his work a lot.

Design tools: As Gensler is an architectural, designing and planning firm so the employers have to work with various tools that can make their work better in the less time. Scott says that they use the tools like SketchUp, Rhino, and Revit and for a degree use 3ds Max, along this there main visualization tool is V-Ray. The detailed works are done using the Unity and Unreal gaming tools and create some mutual visualization. Without this I Ray and other apps are used and Deadline tool is used to produce a global render in the network resources.

Process of producing powerful and pleasing imagery: Though producing imagery is different for different project and different designers use different tools but in general V-Ray is used by all in every design as a baseline. This tool has been using by the designers from a long decade and with the newest versions they can create render while continuously working in a project without stopping anywhere. V-Ray is enough submissive for the artist to work on taking things in conceptual or diagrammatical way or working in the photo-realistic method to get a new view on rendering quality. The latest attempt they scaled into the designs is the materials with using a system named ‘Avail’. This is especially designed for the AEC industry and has over 1500 V-Ray materials and a shared library for the designers. Other Software named Substance Designer which is a mechanical material builder is used to make any kind of virtual thing like carpet, wood, stone or anything to give a real look. The whole library is connected with all the offices across the world where everyone uses the same palette to get their first renderings off the ground.

A ‘standard workflow’: A standard workflow means an upgraded and useful workflow that is common in every field and every office of Gensler; it is the SketchUp and Microsoft. SketchUp help to dive in and mass out their ideas quickly to a downloadable textures and speed up the work, on the other hand the retailer dept. use SketchUp with Microsoft to present their design in the app on-the-fly. After that they use a mixture of Fuzor and Enscape to utilize a real-time rendering, besides these they use 3ds Max Interactive, Revit etc. also. For the game engine they have different level of thinking, all the designers want to make the gaming engines quick for modeling and want different outputs and recently working on it.

Collaboration: Scott has a goal to make a firm platform of rendering across the board so for rendering he uses V-Ray’s upgrading version for all platforms. V-Ray gives him a firm platform for every design and solving problems, using materials or adding extra features.

Future of design visualization: Real-time rendering is becoming popular and accessible for all and people are crazy for it but in the other hand the ray-tracing is also gaining attentions. Though they are two separate worlds, but Scott has a gut feeling that in future they can make a combination that will change the future of design visualization.

Scott’s experience with Mixed Reality: Scott had some very good experience while working in this project as they worked with SketchUp viewer for HoloLens and experienced many things about proofing of concept, drooping the custom designed bridge etc. in the real-world environment etc.

The team is recently working on various projects and looking forward to enhance the IoT experience in designing and hoping to take the technology to the next level. Gensel is extremely happy with their employees and convinced also that tools like SketchUp, Rhino, and VR are helping them a lot to grab something big in future.

Article Source: blog.sketchup.com




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Published By
Rajib Dey
www.sketchup4architect.com
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