The WORNCALL Technique.

[marcday]

There hereby follows a decription of The WORNCALL Technique.

To help others that may wish to read this post please refrain from responding until I have finished the post.

Enjoy!

[marcday]

00.
INTRO.

This is a technique to enrich basic flat sketchup renders to a warm and soft cuddly image with a tinge of realism. There are four basic stages to this technique.

01. Multiple exports of the same view within sketchup.
02. Layering these exports in photoshop.
03. Specular painting.
04. Depth of field blur.

While the following tutorial may appear to be a simple step-by-step recipe for you to follow it is in fact only a single path taken through a beautiful wide forest of possibilities. Your humble guide has never automated this process, even though he is a photoshop expert who could easily record his actions for all of the above steps (even the specular painting) and then simply press play when required, due to the simple reason that each view is different and will always need to be tackled in its own way – sometimes the high pass overlays just look silly for example.

Instead, this tutorial will explain the purpose behind each of the layers so that the reader can understand what is being intimated and then apply these processes in a flexible manner.

Rather.

Note: this is a technique for interiors – exteriors look silly if you do this little lot to them.

[marcday]

01.
Multiple sketchup exports.

First, make sure your model, materials, and lighting are correct, and that you have your view of choice safely defined as a page (SAVE!) – to interrupt the exporting process (especially on a mac) often leads to the need to completely re-export the images – this is because we want each of the layers to overlap perfectly. Do not worry about applying a texture to white stucco type walls as we shall bring these to joyous life through the miracle that is specular painting. Export all of the images at a reasonably large size – your guide personally recommends 4000 to 5000 pixels – so that the 'lines' layer outputs nice thin lines.

To continue you will NEED the Display Templates ruby script – which can be easily found on the internet.

[marcday]

01A.
Base Image.

Export a normal shaded view without lines as below. Don't have the dark too dark – we'll be adding plenty of our own.

[marcday]

01B.
Camera Shade.

This can be found in the following menu: view/display templates/multipass/camera shade. The usual sketchup image (01A. Base Image) is a flat looking world of clearly delineated light and shade – to overcome this we will be overlaying several different images to bring richness and complexity – camera shade (or sun shade if it gives you a better feeling for what you want) gives different light levels to different surfaces, and gives fantastic graded shading over curved surfaces – which the Base Image will lack.

[marcday]

01C.
Depth of Field.

This can be found in the following menu: view/display templates/multipass/depth map. Your guide often outputs two of these – one unaltered (as used below), and one with the fog level changed (use the separate fog plugin) – this second depth map can be used for making an additional overlay shading layer for greater depth (pun unintentional) in the image.

[marcday]

01D.
Shadows.

This can be found in the following menu: view/display templates/multipass/shadows. This will be used below to fluff the edges of the sunlight and to add contrast. Be careful to be on the right page when you select this as it takes the time of day from that page – or don't be careful and create weird effects – your guide has often removed bits of wall and roof to get an unrealistic shadow layer just because it looks good.

[marcday]

01E.
Alpha.

This can be found in the following menu: view/display templates/multipass/alpha. Often when we apply the overlays a grey glow will emanate from around the windows – we can use the alpha to reinstate a white window or a blue colour or a sky image. We will also use this to subtly apply a 'bloom' effect around the windows.

[marcday]

01F.
Lines.

Export the normal view with just the lines – no shadows, no textures, no nuffink.

[marcday]

01G.
Texture.

This can be found in the following menu: view/display templates/multipass/texture. This layer doesn't get directly placed into the final image – instead we will use this to create selections based on colour. It can be seen from the image below that your guide has temporarily replaced the white walls with a concrete image – this is so we can select mottled areas of wall and then paint them to generate a specular effect. We also use this separate texture image as it has no lighting – so we can paint the specular in the correct areas unhindered by the light cast in the scene.