Discover the complex process of creating interior scenes, adjusting perspectives, and fine-tuning shadows in architectural models. This content offers a detailed step-by-step guide on how to enhance the visual dynamics of your projects using SketchUp, a powerful 3D modeling software.
Key Insights
- Setting up interior scenes involves adjusting the camera angle, positioning the view, and refining the perspective. This helps in creating a realistic visual representation of the interior space.
- Adding shadows to your scenes can increase the depth and realism of the project. Adjusting shadow settings such as lightness, darkness, and time of day can significantly impact the overall aesthetic of the rendered scene.
- While creating exterior views, it's crucial to manage and save your files carefully, particularly when dealing with complex elements like 3D plants and shadows. This could prevent potential system crashes and keep your work progress secure.
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And the next thing that I want to do is create some scenes in the interior. So let's zoom in to this portion on the interior. Let's set a wide angle lens because I'm getting kind of stuck in these walls.
So click our zoom and we'll type in 65, a little bit wider angle. Let's find a nice view that's in the corner that kind of looks into the, you can use our, our walk tool to kind of set this up. We're like right at that, at that wall, kind of position this, this around so we can kind of can see the overall kind of clubhouse people in here and the furniture can always adjust the field of use.
Maybe it's not so wide angle, a little more realistic than just like this. And I'll go to my camera, make sure I have two point perspective, and then I will go to add, and I will rename this one interior view one. And then I will spin around to the other side, right around over here, trying to get stuck inside of the restrooms.
When you're orbiting around, you will orbit through walls and through windows. So being, being very careful to only just move slightly, kind of go to someplace right here, and then we can adjust our look to be kind of in the right perspective where we're looking outside a little bit. And then we have the right kind of viewpoint.
I'll go to view, camera, two point perspective, position this around to the right location, and we'll go to add, and then right click, rename interior view two. So this has camera location saved, hidden objects, and shadow settings. It does not save the style or the tags or anything like that.
All that's going to be controlled by other sort of views. I do want view exterior view two all the way through here to be included in an animation, so I will uncheck that. Now you can see there are no parentheses around each of these.
The final thing that I like to do for each of these setup is just to make sure that the geometry looks right. I can see here that there's a double layer between the ground and the concrete. If I was to click this, you can see that I have a concrete slab, but there's other layers from the center park or from the community park project.
So I will click into my community park, and I can see that I have a floor right here. I do not want this anymore, so I will delete that. And now if I was to go back into that interior view, I have a nice floor that isn't showing multiple layers on top of each other.
Because I have shadow settings saved, I can turn on shadows and I can adjust where I want these shadows to be for each specific view. Shadows will take a while to turn on because there's other sorts of geometry and trees and plants and lights, but you can see that it's casting shadow through the windows. So I can adjust the time of day.
This is coming in the afternoon, and I can also adjust it in the morning of where the sun is coming through based off of your geolocation that you set. Also the time of year in December when the sun is almost lowest in the sky, which you're going to get very long shadows versus in the summer in June when the sun is really high in the sky, you're going to get very short shadows. So I like more of a dramatic effect, so I'll do somewhere kind of in between the October-November range.
We're not super long shadows, but still get enough of that kind of light into the space. And you can kind of move your dial around to kind of play around what works best. I'll stick it kind of right here in this kind of morning time, where I get some nice light in the side over here, and then I will update the scene.
Then I'll go back into my interior view one, and I will turn on shadows for this one. It does take a while for each scene if there are different shadows, as it has to regenerate for each time. I'll turn on shadows, and you can adjust on the lightness of the outdoors and then the darkness of actual shadows.
So that'll create a lot more contrast into the space, or if you increase the dark, that'll decrease the contrast and make the shadows not very visible. I kind of like the the lightness to be all the way up, and then the shadows to be kind of in between the 40 and 50 range. And I will update, right click update.
Now let's go to our exterior views and create some shadows. This is where the computer has to tend to not quite work out so good when you're doing shadows on things. So bear with me as things might go slow, or if you're running into issues on your own computer, now would be a good time to save your file.
I'm going to save my file just in case, and as I start turning on shadows, you may realize that your model doesn't like that, and that's where I would recommend if you're having a hard time with these 3D plants and shadows, revert back to the 2D plants and 2D trees to use. So I'll turn on shadows here. In here, we can adjust the time of day.
I got a nice shadow being cast on the wall from the palm tree. I got some shadow cast on this wall right here. I can change it to the other direction where the sun is going to be coming this way.
That would make this entire building in shadow. So I like it more in the evening where we get some longer shadows in this part of the building in the daylight. Somewhere kind of right around here.
Great. I will right-click update. Make sure you want to move this to around 1 p.m. 1 p.m. in October 27th.
I'm kind of just like just eyeballing and playing around where I think things are good. I don't really like this shadow down in the foreground, so I'm trying to find a way where that's gone, but I do like this tree casting a shadow on this building. So I'm kind of slowly tweaking this to get this.
And I'm going to turn my lightness all the way up and then move my dark to around this like between 40 and 50 range. Now I will right-click update and I'll go to exterior view 2. And again I can add some shadows to here. This time I want to make it more noon so I can see some of the slats casting more of a shadow into this space.
And maybe more in the summertime where the sun is more vertical. Something just like this. I'll change my lightness.
Maybe make my darkness a little bit darker and I'll go to update. And then I'll go back to my exterior view 3. Modify shadows for this scene. Again using my same sort of settings to kind of find a right time of day that works best.
Organize shadow down on the the trellis. So I will right-click update once you find a found a good time of day for your shadows. Feel free to copy the same time that I'm doing.
I'm just playing around at this point. There's no fixed time of day that works best. Just try to find a good time of day that casts some, you know, very unique shadows to this specific project.
And then finally on this view we'll turn on our shadows. We'll change the time of day to maybe a little more on the the morning side. Maybe a little bit sun a little higher in the sky.
More summer. Turn on my turn up my light. Turn down my dark slightly.
And I will update. Now the great thing that I have these working styles. If I'm in this view right here this working style is only going to change the style.
It will not change the shadow settings. If I was to go into working style it'll it'll change to get rid of that all the trees but I'll still keep the shadows on. If I would like the working style to not include the shadows which is sometimes best what I would do is I would check shadows and then I would actually physically turn it off.
And sometimes I would like to use sun for shading because this would actually still use where the sun's at. It actually won't cast specific shadows. But for this case working just unchecking that is the best.
You can still control other settings. Now I'll update this so we have that working file and I can go back to you know my view four that you know has the shadows on and then final has the the landscape settings. And then now I'll go to my final exterior view five and I will turn on my shadows one last time.
I'll just be more in the morning so you get some nice shadows in this in this space. And then I will brightness it up turn on the darkness slightly of shadows and then right click update. Then go back to working style and I also would like to actually have my working style be a more generic like location so I want to actually have my camera location now be saved.
So I'll check camera location which is right here then I can update this. So whenever I'm like in the middle and I want to go back to like okay things are things are too busy right now there's the shadows are working or funk or throwing it off I can go back to this working style and it can back me right out into this scene where I have no shadows on landscapes put away and it's it should be a very clean and fast to operate. And final has all this stuff and then export would have all this but plus the thickness.
If I'm in exterior view one with export then this will show the various thicknesses of these plants but if I go into final it'll remove the the line thickness and it'll just show the on the thin lines. We're going to wait for it to reset and think there we go. I will go back to my working style for when I save so that way it's clean when I first open up the model I will save as this as final save as community park I'll rename this to final-dm in my skp201 file downloads folder.
I will save and in the next video which is going to be our final video of skp201 we will show how to how to work with various styles and more artistic styles when you want to export something from sketchup rather than taking it into a rendering program or photoshop. There's a lot of powerful built-in tools that we can use to make some really beautiful images straight from sketchup. I will see you in the next video!