Piranesi and Sketchup

[Anonymous]

At last a real forum!

I'm working my way through the Piranesi tutorials with the demo version. About to start #6.

Pro: The gallery shows what can be done, some very passable stuff.

Con: This is not a easy program to use. Dozens of settings, check boxes, etc.

Any one feel strongly one way or the other...is it worth the time to learn?

Also trying the Sketchup demo.

Pro: Seems simple rectilinear planes and masses can be very quickly made. I like the approach to modeling.

Con: If you go beyond the simple you're better off with ArchiCAD or another 3D modeler. You could do a detailed model, but would have to redo it in ArchiCAD. No lathe tool.

Not sure it would be all that useful. Nice if ArchiCAD or Zoom GDL could incorporate these features.

[Dwight]

Piranesi:

I am developing a vision for Piranesi that will go beyond the faux-painterly things they show in their exercises. It only seems complex when you don't have a vision to express - too many choices, not enough decision-making. If your vision is textured and "painterly," put on your flouncy smock and beret and get to experimenting.

SketchUp:

there's no lathe tool, but the product manager showed me a quick way to resize the ends of a cylinder and make segments rotate around a centroid.

This program is about sketchy conceptual stuff that should only take a few minutes and remain light, sort of like the happy version of Canned Heat's "On The Road Again."

"Keep it Light."

[Karl Ottenstein]

rbissett wrote:
I'm working my way through the Piranesi tutorials with the demo version. About to start #6.

Pro: The gallery shows what can be done, some very passable stuff.

Con: This is not a easy program to use. Dozens of settings, check boxes, etc.

Any one feel strongly one way or the other...is it worth the time to learn?

Hey, Robert! I've been doing the same thing and was going to send you the demo CD when I was finished with it!

A note for the Piranesi 3 demo CD that I got from Informatix today: if you are on a dual processor system, or a Pentium 4 with hyperthreading enabled (looks like dual to the system), the demo seems to crash frequently. Fixed by assigning it to one processor: start Piranesi demo, ctrl-alt-del, in the Process tab, find Piranesi.exe and right mouse it, choose 'Set Affinity..." and pick a processor.

Their gallery images do not impress me much, but halfway-through the tutorials and leaning towards a purchase, the program does. Like any tool, it is the talent of the operator and not the software that will result in a good image. There's nothing I've seen in Piranesi that I can't do in Photoshop with more control...however, Piranesi seems way faster and fun.

Compared to Photoshop, I thought Piranesi was easy...way fewer options, checkboxes, etc.

More later when I finish the tutorials and try to get one of my own images in from ArchiCAD/Artlantis.

Karl

[Anonymous]

There is a SketchUp2ArchiCAD plugin for 8.0 and 8.1 in the works.

ZoomGDL et. al will only create library parts. SketchUp models translate into walls/roofs/slabs/windows and library parts.

SketchUp 3.0 has a library part for Geodesic Dome, which translates into roofs, so you can delete, modify the individual roofs (material, thickness, skylight, etc.)

I think the user interface deceptively simple, but with the push-pull tool, (by the way arcs will be extruded into smooth cylindrical surfaces), the breaking up and healing of surfaces is pretty powerful.

[LiHigh]

Karl wrote:
There's nothing I've seen in Piranesi that I can't do in Photoshop with more control...however, Piranesi seems way faster and fun.
Karl

There are 2 things that I like about piranesi that are missing from Photoshop:
1) Depth---enable inserting people/car/tree w/ auto-scale easily & whatever infront will block those behind them.
2) Surface orientation---textures will orient itself to the surface.

[Karl Ottenstein]

LiHigh wrote:

Karl wrote:
There's nothing I've seen in Piranesi that I can't do in Photoshop with more control...however, Piranesi seems way faster and fun.
Karl

There are 2 things that I like about piranesi that are missing from Photoshop:
1) Depth---enable inserting people/car/tree w/ auto-scale easily & whatever infront will block those behind them.
2) Surface orientation---textures will orient itself to the surface.

Not disagreeing with you at all ... but that is part of what I mean about Piranesi being faster. In fact, I'm going to disagree with myself now! 😉

I would add to your list:
3) the ability to have brush strokes (pencil lines/etc) take (1) and (2) into account in order to mimick the way we draw or paint by hand. Can't do this realistically even with tricks in Photoshop. The Photoshop (and other software) 'artsy' filters don't know anything about geometry, and so just fill areas without any concept of the orientation of planes and their depths. A Piranesi filter can do this automatically, while every plane in Photoshop would require a separately skewed image to be masked and mapped.

For texture orientation in Photoshop, one simply free-transforms and skews ... pretty quick once you're adept, but only if the geometry is very rectilinear. Impossible to be accurate with curvy stuff. And for cutouts, I agree again ... but in Photoshop you do that with masking layers and scale by eye (obviously not as accurate). You can actually do tricks with Photoshop and Archicad/Artlantis by creating one rendered image that is the same as the material view in Piranesi ... and then magic wand a material to create a selection mask, etc...

Piranesi is much faster and easier and now that I've worked through the tutorials in the demo and tried a couple of images from ArchiCAD and Artlantis, I'll be putting my order in tomorrow!

Cheers,
Karl

[Anonymous]

How does Pirenesi compare to Studio Artist 2 ?

Will it work with a series of images like in an animation? NRR is very popular but I tried it with a client and they didn't like it, they prefered the photorealistic look.

Excuse me, I have to go now I hear the guard.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Burginger wrote:
How does Pirenesi compare to Studio Artist 2 ?

Will it work with a series of images like in an animation? NRR is very popular but I tried it with a client and they didn't like it, they prefered the photorealistic look.

Hi Mark,

I'd say there's almost no relation. I just checked out the SA 2 web site - and its a very exciting product that my artist friends would probably love (if they were on a Mac) ... but it is basically a flatland painting program, super-sophisticated that it is.

Piranesi's strength is that all tools can be aware of and react to depth as well as the geometrical orientation of surfaces in an image. This is because it operates on EPix (Extended Pixel) files that contain a depth map, a material map, and an RGB image.

This means that if you want to insert a photomontage (cutout) of an oriental rug in a room, it will appear underneath the chairs and tables, properly scaled and in perspective. SA2 has no such knowledge AFAIK.

If you want to paint a moulding around all of the visible walls in an image, Piranesi will scale and skew the moulding to retain perspectives.

You can take a picture of your client, mask it out, and then insert it into the scene and have it scaled automatically as you move your cursor around the scene to decide upon its location.

Even after you've painted and added cutouts, you can have Piranesi generate reflections in surfaces...because, as before, it is aware of the geometry necessary to calculate them and to mask appropriate elements in the scene.

Much more of course... but the above are examples that are photorealistic, which your clients prefer.

For non-photorealistic work, since Piranesi is aware of the 3D geometry, brush strokes or etchings can automatically keep the same relationship to planes, much as you might sketch or paint by hand...in one step. In a paint program, you have to manually paint each surface to get the same effect.

Depth based gradients are also pretty cool - both for photorealistic and non-PR images. These can be used to darken or lighten distant hallways, create fog or other ambience effects, create depth-based blurring or other filters and much more. So interactive and fun ... but not possible in an ordinary paint program that isn't depth and material aware.

Piranesi can paint in a 2D mode (frontal) and operate with just 2D images (which you can convert to have certain types of depth behavior), and while brushes can be defined by any image that you might create in Photoshop/etc and there are a multitude of blending modes, textures, filters, and automatic (algorithmic / monte carlo) painting options ... there isn't the full richness of painterly things that appear to be in SA2.

Piranesi won't work with an animation - no rotoscoping.

HTH,
Karl