New Woodworking Plan using SketchUp

[JeffBranch]

I am not the only one who uses SketchUp to create woodworking plans, but I also use several other programs to make them as close to magazine quality as I can. With this plan, I began using Photoshop to enhance the images output from SketchUp Pro.

 

See the plan at Issuu.com here:

 

http://issuu.com/jeffbranch/docs/apartment-dining-table-1108141

 

Download the plan from my blog here:

 

https://jeffbranch.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/apartment-dining-table-1108141.pdf

 

I will soon start my next plan; a main goal is to make it even more magazine like.

 

Thanks for looking,

 

Jeff

[wtnhighlander]

I'd say you are achieving your goal, those are very proffessional, magazine style plans. Nice work.

[JeffBranch]

Thanks WTN. I am thinking of using a rendering program such as Kerkythea to get photo quality renderings. I have many old ww projects to draw from which I never took photos of.

[chefmagnus@grics.net]

I would say that you could put it into any of the wood magazines and it would not look out of place. Very nicely done...

[chefmagnus@grics.net]

How about a link for the plan in SketchUp? Or posting it here in the plans?

[Dewald Swanepoel]

Very nice indeed. I particularly like how you've managed to get your long grain and tangential grain to meet nicely on the edge. Very well done.

 

I'd be very interested to see the results you get with rendering these plans in Kerkythea. I've never used it but I've noticed that there are tools for exporting between Sketchup and Kerkythea.

 

I've used Sketchup / POVRay rather extensively and have managed to get some pretty decent results. They're both really powerful applications and when you combine the two you can weave magic.

[JeffBranch]

Chief - Thanks, I will look into a SketchUp only plan for this table. Never done that before.

 

Deefstes - Thank you, I look for really good wood images, get one face the way I want it, then use the eye dropper tool within the paint bucket to make the grain continue onto other faces. I then copy a component which already looks good and use it where possible on new components. Just how I do it; there is probably a better way. How hard is POVRay to learn?

[Dewald Swanepoel]

Chief - Thanks, I will look into a SketchUp only plan for this table. Never done that before.

 

Deefstes - Thank you, I look for really good wood images, get one face the way I want it, then use the eye dropper tool within the paint bucket to make the grain continue onto other faces. I then copy a component which already looks good and use it where possible on new components. Just how I do it; there is probably a better way. How hard is POVRay to learn?

 

I would lie if I said that POVRay was a cinch but I'm sure anyone can master it if they put their mind to it. If you are mathematically inclined, you might actually enjoy getting to know it. What makes it tricky is that it has no visual user interface. All of the model definitions, scene settings, light sources etc. are done in a text editor. It's basically a programming language.

 

Having said all that, using the SU2POV export tool, you don't actually have to know anything about POVRay at all. The exporter creates the POVRay file you need. All you do is to open it in POVRay and hit the "render" button.

Unfortunately I just made an unpleasant discovery though. I have not done any exporting to POVRay since I've upgraded to Sketchup 2014. So just now I quickly slapped together a Sketchup model to approximate your table, only to discover that the plugin does not work in SU 2014 and up. I'm not seeing any talk on the SU2POV page to suggest that there are immediate plans to update it, so I'm worried. Looks like I may have to investigate this Kerkythea thing after all.

For what it's worth, I loaded the model in SU8 to do a quick export and here is a rough render I made of it. Of course this can be improved upon significantly by tweaking the light sources a bit and by using decent textures. I've just used a very rudimentary tileable wood texture.

 

 

But  you know what, if I'm being perfectly honest, I'm not sure that photorealistic renders are really the way to go for magazines. I think the simplicity of your images make them much better suited for an article where you want the reader to be able to see clearly how the components of the table fit together. In the picture above for instance, it's not quite so easy to see at a glance what the front apron looks like as it sort of blends in with the surrounding boards. You can address this by shifting the light sources a bit but then you might have other components that don't stand out.

[JeffBranch]

Deefstes, that is pretty slick and your model looks very accurate when compared to mine. I know what you mean about keeping the images more like illustrations vs. photo realistics. I experimented in this woodworking plan with opacity settings to obtain a xray like view of specific components while keeping other components non-xray. I suspect you can't do that with a render program. Note the image in the upper left on page 8. I want to explore being able to do that better.

[Dewald Swanepoel]

I experimented in this woodworking plan with opacity settings to obtain a xray like view of specific components while keeping other components non-xray. I suspect you can't do that with a render program.

Yes you can. You can set materials to be semi transparent. There's a lot you can do with the materials. You can even give it a refractive interior such that the table looks like it's made of a woody glass

 

Here is the same render but with the material set to 65% transparency, except for the stretcher boards. Again though, I'm not sure you want to be "realistic" when you portray transparent tables. I think your Sketchup approach works perfectly.

[JeffBranch]

Deefstes, that's interesting and a pretty good look. I just dread learning another complicated software product like a render program. May just stick with what I am doing and try to do some things with Illustrator. Thanks for the conversation.