Dynamic Components III

Visualizer View Texture 3

SketchUp offers great opportunities for interactive visualizations, and perhaps one of its most interesting features for this purpose is dynamic components (check our previous posts about them: I and II). I must admit, though, that I had not dared to try them enough to consider using them. But the right project came along, so I had to get up to speed.

We were asked to create a collection of tile-able textures for laminate surfaces for inclusion in SketchUp's 3d Warehouse. The textures had to be seamless, correctly scaled, and later added to a collection library so they could be used in a 3D model. So we used dynamic components to make a kitchen model I found in the 3d Warehouse (thanks "Dilbert"!) interactive. I modified the whole laminate surface to contain all the textures provided by the client; the dynamic component's definition allows for the surface to switch patterns just by clicking on it. This is how it ended up working:

So this interactive process from SketchUp gives you an idea of how these different textures could look in context. But what about a more realistic look? As I showed before in a previous post, Visualizer is a very simple rendering plug-in that brings some real lighting qualities to a SketchUp model. Running the views through Visualizer, you can appreciate not only the pattern, but the sheen of the laminate surface, and get a sense of daylighting and depth of field. So which one of these fancy laminate surfaces would you put in your kitchen?

Sebastian Marticorena was an illustrator at Fat Pencil Studio from 2014-2016.