images looks good 
Wow, did you make the tower yourself? Or is it a model from somewhere else
I think it is this model:
https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.c…05c915/Eiffel-Tower-Paris
- i've used it once myself, a loooong time ago
Posts by Herbo
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That sounds great
I dont know if You know about Designconnected.com. They provide some of the best (if not THE best) furniture and accessories models in the industry. I've been using them for quite some time... and one of the most awesome features of their site is the "Model Sets" part... in here there is curated collections of models that fits nicely together This might be a nice inspiration for the asset library -
Well...you deserve it!
How heavy is your model? How much time did it take you from start to finish? I would like to know more about your method of texturing complex models...that is what I always struggle with. Do you model everything in separate files and then copy/paste it in composition file? How do you set up your lights? I have so many questions... If you could make the whole start-to-finish "making of" tutorial that would be awsome! I think that everybody here would like to see it... If you want to become a master, you have to learn from the best!
Thank you! I would love to make a complete walk through of the work at some point
unfortunately time is limited, so i cant promise i'll get it done any time soon But let me try to answer some of the questions:I dont know the total time spend, but definitely more than i should have! I would say i spend 2-3 hours most days since I started around december 5th. with some basic sketches of the layout. this is one of the first "block outs" of the idea:
For texturing i use a couple of different methods. Sketchup is really bad at handling real UV maps as standard, so plugins are necessary to make it work
depending on the complexity of the task i use either:1: Sketch-UV
2: Thru-Paint
3: WrapR (by far the most powerful, but also a bit complicated to learn if You are not used to UV's)
I rely Heavily on the Proxy function for sketchup, to setup my scenes without destroying sketchup and my machine
as much as possible is kept in seperate files. This includes the whole factory and all the mountains in this case That way it was also easier for me to make changes to specific items, as the models were not as heavy. And it was MUCH faster to move items around the scene to get the compositions to work just right :(all the squares and spheres are part of the lighting for the scene)
I also spend a lot of time tweaking test renders with comments and sketching. this is an example of how I make "notes" for myself to work from:
I hope that can clarify some of the things
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That part is the first part that arouse my curiosity in the whole model. Therefore your explanation make me happy, thanks!
I'm glad you could use it!
Wow! This is fantastic work. Well done.
Was there a lot of post processing required?Thank you very much! yes, this time i spend a lot more time in post than usual. This is due to the very specific lighting and colors i wanted to achieve. with that said, everything in the scene is 3d, and nothing was added in in photoshop (except the smoke and some details in the sky). it is all color grading and adjustments
I might share some insight of the photoshop work later
but I can say that i had to render the images with multiple lighting setups and exposures, and then merge them together to get the feel I wanted at least 4 base renders for was made for each image.
Hello Herbo!
I read this forum for a wile, but I had never leave a comment, actualy, I have just posted my first post a couple of days ago...but man...I just can't ignore this one! First of all, I can't see how could anyone beat you in this contest. Despite the fact that I have seen many beautifull renders and good ideas so far, you just have it all. This is perfection in every posible way - idea, composition, textures, models, atmosphere, post work...and that sarcastic story after all. You have my honest appreciation for everything you have done! Please, share as many "making off-s" as you can...modeling, mapping, tools and extensions used...I want to learn it!
You already have that RTX...the rest of us will fight for the rest. 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Thank you SO much! i'm very honoured, and very warmed by your comment. It seems that none of the work and ideas was lost on you, and that makes me very happy
i'll try and share as many tips and tricks as i can Happy New Year!
best work around !
wonder about that mountains , 3d or photoshop ?
Thank you very much
i'm glad you like it!
Everything in the scene is 3d, including the mountains They were basically made the same way as the snow i showed further up:first i found a suitable heightmap, and reduced the image size to roughly 300x300. otherwise it gets WAY to heavy for the program to handle:
then I imported it to sketchup and used the plugin "mesh from bitmap":
resulting in:
I found a heightmap that came with a basic albedo texture as well, that i then enhanced in photoshop. I painted that texture over my new geometry, resulting in what you see in the renders
hope that helps! -
Thank you very much
yep, there has been quite a lot of modelling (and lighting!), but it has been fun Here is an example of how I made the elf in the snow:i found a great elf model, that i imported via Transmutr. i made both a high poly version for the render, and a low poly for cloth simulation. I had to redo all the textures, as the model came with "baked" lighting, and therefore did not work with my custom lighting setup. i also chanced the hue of the elf for my renders.
I then used the low poly version to prepare the drape (the cloth is prepared with a custom "santa's helper" logo):
and then ran the cloth simulation:
I used quixel mixer to prepare a custom snow material with the right footprints and tracks to match the elf and sled:
I then used the generated displacement map to create geometry from, using a plugin called "bitmap to mesh":
resulting in:
and this matched the elf and sled perfectly:
i then started to create the assets that had to go on the sled, including photo scanned boxes and sacks, and a custom "homeless" sign:
I hope you like it
let me know if You want to se more "making of" - stuff -
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from SANTA CORP.
The Holiday season of 2019 has come to an end, and it has been another great year for SANTA CORP, the world leader in seasonal toy production and distribution.
Our goals to further optimize and robotize production has been met, and although that has meant laying off most Elfs, we truly believe this will benefit growth and revenue!
We have also made great strides to lower material costs, by introducing new exciting chemicals and plastics. Most of them are not even that toxic! True, a couple of reindeers might have had allergic, fatal reactions, but we are (almost) sure that children will be fine.
The ongoing expansion of the toy factory has also been going as planned, with the new chemical waste system finally in operation. This new, state of the art system, safely transfers toxic waste away from the factory, and out into the empty north pole ice, where no one (except reindeers and polar bears) is harmed.
The new, drone-based gift distribution system has taken over from the old fashioned “Reindeer- sleigh” -System this year. Our new drone, “SLEIGH-BOT 5000”, is more energy efficient, faster and more reliable than Rain deer… and it even looks cool!
All in all, it has been a great year, and are sure that investors and costumers alike will be thrilled to know that SANTA CORP. remains the number one Toy factory in the world!
Merry Christmas
CEO, Claus
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This is my entry for the #EnscapeUnwrapped competition. i've taken a quite different approach, and have told the story of a modern, corporate Santa's toy factory... Gone are the cute elfs and reindeer, and in comes hardcore industry, producing toys for the 2 billion children of the world
it is a humorous comment on the excessive consumption and spending of the season A LOT of work has gone into the modelling and planing of the scene. many ideas have been tried, and many sketches of layouts and designs have been produced. Some models are found online, but they are all heavily modified to fit with the overall scheme. i've used several new (for me) techniques, including custom quixel mixer materials, clothworks simulations and displacement modelling.
More information on the process and small insights in techniques can be found further down in this thread:
I hope You all had a fantastic Christmas and a great new year, and i'm looking forward to a new year with lots of Enscaping and inspiration from You all -
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from SANTA CORP.
The Holiday season of 2019 has come to an end, and it has been another great year for SANTA CORP, the world leader in seasonal toy production and distribution.
Our goals to further optimize and robotize production has been met, and although that has meant laying off most Elfs, we truly believe this will benefit growth and revenue!
We have also made great strides to lower material costs, by introducing new exciting chemicals and plastics. Most of them are not even that toxic! True, a couple of reindeers might have had allergic, fatal reactions, but we are (almost) sure that children will be fine.
The ongoing expansion of the toy factory has also been going as planned, with the new chemical waste system finally in operation. This new, state of the art system, safely transfers toxic waste away from the factory, and out into the empty north pole ice, where no one (except reindeers and polar bears) is harmed.
The new, drone-based gift distribution system has taken over from the old fashioned “Reindeer- sleigh” -System this year. Our new drone, “SLEIGH-BOT 5000”, is more energy efficient, faster and more reliable than Reindeer… and it even looks cool!
All in all, it has been a great year, and we are sure that investors and costumers alike will be thrilled to know that SANTA CORP. remains the number one Toy factory in the world!
Merry Christmas
CEO, Claus
-----------------------------------------------------------------
This is my entry for the #EnscapeUnwrapped competition. i've taken a quite different approach, and have told the story of a modern, corporate Santa's toy factory... Gone are the cute elfs and reindeer, and in comes hardcore industry, producing toys for the 2 billion children of the world
it is a humorous comment on the excessive consumption and spending of the season
A LOT of work has gone into the modelling and planing of the scene. many ideas have been tried, and many sketches of layouts and designs have been produced. Some models are found online, but they are all heavily modified to fit with the overall scheme. i've used several new (for me) techniques, including custom quixel mixer materials, clothworks simulations and displacement modelling.I might share some images from the process further down in the thread
I hope You all had a fantastic Christmas and a great new year, and i'm looking forward to a new year with lots of Enscaping and inspiration from You all -
This time I tried to work on a socializing scene between friends and family.
as I always say Family is everything
Merry Christmas.
Skt and Ens 2.6.1
Images looks good, but personally I would MUCH rather have seen what you could have made if you had spend ALL that time making one, truly unique, personal rendering, instead of 10 more or less random scenes with 3-4 random camera angels
I alway favour quality over quantity With that said, i wish you the best of luck, and a merry Christmas -
Great Idea with a little holiday competition
I'm looking forward to seeing some great entries! I'm planning on doing a little render as well, but due to a lack of free time it will probably take some time to get done, hehe.
good luck to everyone
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As always spectacular results!
What's the source of those vegetation models?Thanks! The models are from this collection:
the materials has been tweaked a bit for enscape though.
- it does take some effort to make them behave right with skatter. I remember seeing a tutorial on this from some time ago
Aren't these pictures real photos?
Damn, You got me!
Awesome vegetation. Great work!
You selected Revit as your tool for this thread? Must be Sketchup, right?
Thanks
You are totally right, i've changed it to sketcup 
"Quite good"
*EDIT* Herbo you've just stalled the whole support team for a couple minutes, we can't process this. Everybody picked one of your images as new desktop wallpaper.
Hehe, thanks! I'm glad You all liked it! and i'm sorry for delaying all support tickets then
Amazing results!
But we all expect the top from master Herbo
Thank you! well, i'm not sure i can deliver on that title though
Great work! Besides the beautifull greenery, the props (lamp) are they Sketchup Warehouse?
Thank you! the model are from various places, but the dining chairs, table, lamps and lounge chair are alle bought from DesignConnected. They have some REALLY high quality stuff.
The eames bird are from the warehouse, and the blanket over the chair is made by me with clothworks for sketchup
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...Herbo: that's EXACTLY how a camera works! That is why it's unsettling to have a different behaviour for the rendering!
Attached abstract from "View Camera Technique" by Leslie Stroebel.
You are right! well then, GO GO GO!
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Hi to the DEVs team!
I found a little thing puzzling: when we now try to set DOF, we have sort of a "plane" going nearer/further; instead, the focal field should be individuated between TWO planes. The greater the DOF value, the wider the distance between the two planes (so, the more objects in focus). At the moment, to me is nearly impossible to control the objects which have to be in focus and those which I want to be out of focus, maybe a little more control over this could be of help to many.
I agree! I think I even asked the exact same thing a long time ago 😊 I know this is not how a camera works, but It would make the tool SO much easier to use. It is, as you said, almost impossible to keep an object in focus, even with the dof slider almost all the way down...
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Hi
i've been playing with some new plant models for vertical gardens, and using skatter to create green walls
when it is all correctly set up, it works quite good! -
If you open a project with everything in it you can quickly see all the items, you select everything you need in your project, copy and paste it into your working project. Not have to go through the enscape library all the time and wait to load.. Grab what you need and get it into your project at one go, then just nicly place it in your project..
okay, I see
but loading Sketchup (with a bunch of plugins), and then starting enscape with more than a 1000 assets, and then try to find what you need seems VERY inefficient compared to just starting the actual library, with groupings, search and more and that doesn't even include the time it takes to keep the file up to date
if it works for you, then great, but i dont think i will adopt this method
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Hi
i've been forced to revert to the old 2.6.0 version, as i've not had any luck with rendering large images (above roughly 3000x2000) from large scenes (airport project) with the newest official release, 2.6.1. It will, however, export the exact same view in a lower resolution. when i try to do a render with the latest version, sketchup (and the enscape window) simply freezes up, and i have to close it all down.
I hope this will be fixed soon, as i really enjoyed the speed of RTX enabled on my rtx2080.
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I agree, it would be super to be able to see the newly added content!
but, just out of curiosity, why do you have projects with all the assets in them? what is the use of that?
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What plugin is that?
a very simple plugin by ThomThom has done the job for me
as long as the textures in the two materials are the same formats, it works ok https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/material-replacer
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I wish Enscape Team can incorporate these grass models to the default grass rendering so everyone can have good looking grass by default.
I agree that the default enscape grass could use an overhaul, but i'm not sure that my solution is a good match for everyone
performance is SEVERAL times slower than normal grass, and it wont be useful for people with low end hardware, VR, or for models with huge grass areas But for cases like min (highest possible realism), they are great! I have no idea how Lumion is doing their new grass system, but it looks great (for what it is), and i'm hoping something similar could be achieved with the default grass in Enscape 
Very interesting, haven't checked out Vizpark in depth before, but they appear to have quite the library of content. Have you had success using them for anything besides the grass with Sketchup? Other plants, materials, or HDRIs perhaps?
actually i've had the models from them for a LONG time, as they were originally purchased for use with Maxwell render. I have the real grass, real trees and real plants, and all models are high quality! just keep in mind, that they are NOT optimized for real time rendering, and will therefore hamper performance on most systems
I havent tried their materials or HDRI's but i would imagine that the quality is good!
Thanks for the info.
When combining textures, did you have to do mapping manually for those parts?
And I think I will have to learn how to create Skatter templates.i used a sketchup plugin to combine some materials, and that kept the UV mapping
The model comes with 10 different maps for a strand of grass, and I reduced that to around 3 Skatter is a GREAT system! ver. 2 is on its way, and the new features look very promising. I'm hoping Enscape will continue to support it as much as possible!
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Looks great. Can we see a wireframe view as well?
Is it made by you or optimised from a bought collection?
How do you use a patch that is 60x60 m?
Only for flat ground?Hi
Unfortunately i can't share a wireframe, as it is all scattered using Skatter, with the render only feature
all the models are from Vizpark - Real Grass collection, but quite optimized for use in enscape. That has been done by using Transmutr to take the OBJ's into sketchup with a poly count reduction. Then all the textures was streamlined (some combined, and textures resized and compressed)
well, the 60x60 meter patch is just to indicate how large my model is. as it is done by Skatter, and saved as a template, it can be applied to any size surface... and shape! my model has hills, with all the grass acting as it should
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i've recently been looking at some new grass models, and have been trying to optimize them (as much as possible) for use in enscape
They will eventually be part of my "philip johnsons glass house" project the patch of grass rendered here is around 60x60 meters, and performance is pretty good on my RTX 2080.
hope you like it