Horizon

[Ron_Bruins]

Hi,

Is there an easy way to get a view where the horizon shows good as well...

If you have a model and use a spherical sky you need to angle it that you have the foreground to cover the horizon.
But if there is nothing in the foreground, you need a really, really large plane to cover the image so visually the horizon is OK, but this again is making the model too big.

I tried to used a curved surface upwards to fake the horizon, bur this seems not to work properly

Regards,
Ron

[Ecuadorian]

Could you please post a screenshot of your SketchUp view? Perhaps someone here can figure out a way.

[Ron_Bruins]

Of course I can...see below a SU view and the render....

SU view

horizon-1.jpg (355.29 KiB) Viewed 9381 times

2 pass easy-09 view for reference

horizon-1r.jpg (660.48 KiB) Viewed 9391 times

[Fletch]

open spherical sky in photo editor
move sky down as far as you need
save sky as new image
load new image into spherical sky slot.
render.

[Ron_Bruins]

It's not a spherical sky and so moving it down would have no effect.

Besides that, the horizon is fixed due to the perspective of the view itself as seen in sketchup, therefore changing the horizon will give an unrealistic horizon isn't it?

For now the only solutions I can think off is use a very large plane, or use a jpg with a background and once it behind the model to hide the horizon and so fake the view.

[Fletch]

I see.

Place an image that looks good behind the model by rendering an alpha mask and placing in a high resolution sky, or by using a background image on a plane in SketchUp - see the User Manual Reference Section about Background Image planes.

There are several high resolution images available ready to insert into SketchUp in the Red Carpet Resources section. Check the resources master list for a link.

[Gaieus]

Fletch,

There were discussions about an infinite plane available in TL, weren't there? That could solve the issue I guess.

@Ron: do you (also) use Kerkythea (or at least have it installed)? If you export your model as xml file from Twilight, you can open it in Kerky and there you can add an infinite plane easily.

[Ron_Bruins]

I don't use kerkythea, but this might be useful, so will give this a try when I have the time. Thanks!

[Gaieus]

Kerkythea is a more complex, standalone application (whose engine and settings - modified this or another way maybe - Twilight also uses). Now the beauty in Twilight is that once you set up everything here and export the xml file, you practically do not need to touch anything in Kerky (if you hate steeper learning curves) but press the render button.

However there are some extras that are not (yet?) available in Twilight. One of them is the infinite plane (and maybe another useful thing to look at would be the instancing tools as you can add enormous amount of geometry to Kerky - say trees, grass, whatnot- that would choke SU which still needs to run when Twilight is working).