Dynamic Components III

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?