Design landscapes in 3D
20 May, 2011Daniel Tal, RLA, ASLA, has been a landscape architect for more than 13 years. Creating 3D drawings of his landscapes is critical to his business. He has used the 3D modeling program Google SketchUp to do this easily for a number of years. However, it is only recently that he has found the software to render these images, enabling him to create 3D images for his clients.
"For the work that I am doing: client projects, animations, seminars, teaching and tutorials, rendering is invaluable," he says. "Six months ago it was a luxury to spoil a client with a 3D drawing that had been rendered to a photorealistic quality. Now it's a standard that I meet for every project -- and the clients love it."
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| Image courtesy of Harmony Design Group via ArtVPS. |
In 2010, Tal used Shaderlight for the first time. A plug-in to Google SketchUp, the new software allows him to render his 3D visions, creating images from the drawings.
"Rendering is a really hot topic right now in landscape design and architecture, with both professionals and students wanting to know more," Tal says. "The combination of SketchUp and Shaderlight brings this capability within reach of just about any SketchUp user."
Tal likes to produce a variety of 3D images from his models for animations or to give him a choice of images to present to clients, but needs to do so quickly.
"Until Shaderlight, I did not have the ability to produce renderings in the same quantity and could not create multiple rendered images of any model," he says. "My typical workflow is to set about three to 10 views in my model and I render all of them in Shaderlight. Usually this takes just an hour or two to finish as many as 10 rendered scenes."
Using Shaderlight for rendering architectural and landscape site plan SketchUp models, Tal's current projects focus on creating animations depicting sustainable topics in the landscape. His models tend to be detailed and large, ranging from 500,000 faces to 4 million. Even models that cover a small site are populated with as much detail to convey a realistic scene.
"I use materials that range from paving, lawn, stone, asphalt, metals, crushed gravel and plant material," he says. "Plants and concrete are the hardest to depict accurately, but Shaderlight is able to process and create good graphic representations.
"While most of my Shaderlight renderings are not hyper-real, the reactions from clients, students and colleagues have been overwhelmingly positive," Tal says.
New Jersey-based Harmony Design Group have also been using Shaderlight and Google SketchUp in their residential landscape architecture business. The company used to send its models to another company to be converted into images, but now do the work themselves.
The company says the software allows them to show clients what designs will look like in various settings, such as at night.
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