SketchUp 2014 for Architectural Visualization: Create stunning photorealistic and artistic visuals of your SketchUp models

One of the biggest changes for the end user that came out of the acquisition of SketchUp by Trimble affects the licensing of SketchUp. Google saw SketchUp as a tool to enable everyone to produce content for Google Earth, and Google being Google, they could also afford to give it away for free to everyone.

Unfortunately, Trimble had other ideas, and one of the first changes was to discontinue the free SketchUp edition for professional users. You can still download and use a free version (since 2013, it is called SketchUp Make), but you are not allowed to use it for commercial projects. This is good because it still allows everyone access to a fantastic tool to realize their dream projects and to learn and test the software without the need to pay for a license. It also pushes SketchUp as a professional tool back among all the other commercial software that promises quality and efficiency for a price.

In the previous edition of this book, good arguments were made for the...

Before you can go off and download SketchUp, you have to choose the type of work you are going to do with it. The following three options are available:

The following screenshot shows the options that you can select as per your requirement when you go on to http://www.sketchup.com/download:

There are an incredible number of rendering applications and plugins out there that range from professional high-end renderers to small experimental one-man projects. Technologies range from physically based radiosity engines to gaming platforms, and then, you have to decide how tightly you want your renderer integrated into SketchUp. A strong integration usually means sacrifices in render options or quality.

To help you choose the perfect renderer for your requirements, we have prepared a short and noncomprehensive list of the currently available renderers at the end of the book. By the time you have read the rendering chapters in this book, the entire technobabble will make complete sense; we promise.

If you already have Photoshop (the commercial equivalent of GIMP), lucky you! All of the instructions for GIMP in this book should work for Photoshop too, so you don't need to install GIMP (unless you have trouble following the GIMP instructions in this book). Photoshop Elements or similar software won't do, because they don't have layer masks.

Alright, we're not going to turn you into a fully clued-up movie producer just yet. However, you don't have to be one with the following video-editing tools. One of the most painful experiences we had while researching this book was navigating through the maze of compression codecs, frame rates, aspect ratios, and other thorny issues that make digital moving-image production such a nightmare.

In this book, we will produce animations that are suitable for upload to popular video streaming sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. For this, we will use the following two dedicated tools:

We will look at the details of the process of making a movie in Chapter 10, Animations, and also introduce a few other tools to make our lives as movie producers easier.

So now, you're all set! In this chapter, you were introduced to the following concepts that will be at the core of your arch-viz activities:

Congratulations! You now have a fully functional visualization studio. This setup will save you an enormous amount of time later. It sets you up with a seamless workflow that works and works.

Now, go to the next chapter to get started with visualization in SketchUp, or return to Chapter 1, Quick Start Tutorial, if you were skipping ahead for the software!