Twilight Render User Forum

Here's another true "work in progress". Your comments/thoughts/ideas are welcome and encouraged. The original scene was created and shared by Alvaro Luna Bautista and Joel Anderson.

It took weeks to convert this model so that it will work in SketchUp. Converting, copying, and deleting component per component, all junk, cleaning up everything, etc.
But it now processes the architecture in 15s with Twilight. Twilight process models very quickly (much more so when they utilize components properly). An exporter that uses Ruby takes more like 15 mins on this scene when the bones are included. In Twilight architecture, bones, and all takes about 37s. The 2 dinosaur skeletons combined as a standalone .skp file are 3x the size of the architecture alone. The scene currently stands at 75Mb with textures as shown above.

Most renderings of this scene that I have seen do not incorporate the original ornamentation of the actual building. But as one can take a virtual tour of the Natural History Museum in London online, it's fairly easy to add some things like the ceiling paintings and ornaments in the arches. Most of the other ornamentation, while it's possible, will be left out of this exercise.

As far as we are aware, this is the first time this model has been rendered NATIVELY from WITHIN SKETCHUP!

WOW THIS IS AWESOME. NICELY DONE (SORRY FOR THE SCREAMING)

Awesome. What was it originally modeled in?

It was apparently originally modelled in... blender.
The main problem with the scene was there were thousands of repeating objects, and not a single "component". There's unfortunately no easy way to fix the dinos, and after some attempts, I've decided to live with them as hi-poly monsters. They are not that bad, actually, considering... and I did begin to componentize them, but gave up.

I believe it took me longer to "fix" the model than it did for him to build from scratch. -not including the dinos.
This is usually the case, fixing someone's model is never as fast as building it properly the first time. (I'm not implying it wasn't built properly, I'm sure it was very well done in Blender, but 3D model conversion is like medicine - part art part science.)

In case you were dubious, or just curious... here's how SU is holding up...
The model was converted in many large chunks using Deep Explorer from obj file to SU file. Then each chunk was worked on, and then inserted into the master composite model when ready.
Finally the dinos were added with the display cases. The main reason for converting to SU was to fix the major normals problem. The model, viewed in SU monochrome mode, looked like a blue and white quilt. Thom Thom's cleanup ruby script was used heavily throughout the process and was indispensable!

A LOT of images I see of this museum, those that are rendered, have a ton of dramatic direct light coming in. (this was my first inclination as well)
But after looking at real photos of the space, you see no direct sun light. So the above first image is lit with a white sky, sun off, window glass = thin glass IOR=1. Sky intensity set to 3.

After researching what real dinosaur bones look like, they turn out to be quite dark brownish red from soaking in the minerals from the surrounding soil where they are buried. So, while bright white bones look cool, I decided to create a bone texture made from procedural materials in Kerkythea, and apply that as a library. Same with the stone on the wall, and soil on the ground beneath the dinos.

OMG Fletch, what a interesting project...Your render are beautiful so far, can't wait to see the update...

Wow nice render

WOW

Were you working with the blend files directly or did you get some sort of export? I've had a little practice at this too and seen some of the import export issues. If you have blender you can sometimes turn the subsurf modifiers down and then apply them before you export to bring the poly count down a bit. Blender seems to be able to support a higher poly count than SU. If I can be of any help on the blender side let me know. It doesn't really have componants like SU does though, it uses arrays of objects etc.

Good luck, looks like a huge project

Wow... awesome model, great job so far with the renderings.

Looks like a fun model to render... maybe a little difficult and frustrating, but fun.