SKETCH RENDERING - MORE

[Anonymous]

Is there a document showing examples of all the combinations for the sketch rendering engine?

[Djordje]

Jeff wrote:
Is there a document showing examples of all the combinations for the sketch rendering engine?

No. Immortality is still beyond the human reach.

It would do to go through the predefined styles, and start customization from there.

[Dwight]

The attached spreadsheet view shows the numerical possibilities for the Sketch Rendering Engine. To illustrate them would be a decade's work.

At ACUW, I'll have several useful examples of the Sketch Renderer as well as an explanatory letter from the developer of the plug-in.

[David Pacifico]

This is my prefered Settings, for what it's worth.
Skyliner and Pen and Ink.
Sometimes I will turn down some of the Settings and Overshoot, but I like this becuase of gives a good balance of looks and speed. By having no Sun Shadows and No Hatching it produces pretty fast. Also by having those two options uncheck you don't have to worry about the bottom two panels in the dialog box.

[Dwight]

That is nice. Were those the default settings?
Just for fun, I attach a failure. The fuzzy blobs are 3D figures - too many lines I guess.

[Karl Ottenstein]

David wrote:
This is my prefered Settings, for what it's worth.
Skyliner and Pen and Ink.

Very nice, David! Out of curiousity, have you tried taking a sketch output such as that into Piranesi for some painting? (Or layering it in Photoshop.) I find the overshots and lines from certain Sketch Engine settings such as this more appealing than the sketchy looks that can be obtained in Piranesi or Photoshop themselves.

Karl

[Jefferson]

Karl, David, All,

The layering of sketch and "photoshoped" renderings in photoshop has long been one of the big attractions of ver 8/8.1 for me. (I told Dwight about this a while back) I should have my hands on my own copy of 8.1 in a couple of weeks and can't wait. The look of hand work in renderings is SO much more ascthetically appealing to me and most of my clients. It also has the power of suggestion without giving them something so realistic that the focus is on the details instead of the concept.

Is this sort of what you mean Karl?

[Dwight]

Since the hardness of rendered images is repellent to many, and the Sketch Rendering Engine seems difficult to control and is slow to operate, I have been a long-time supporter of the idea of merging/overlaying a combination of solid [linework] and rendered images in Photoshop.

At my Sketch Render seminar at ACUE last year, it wasn't merely good enough to diss the Sketch Renderer [as I will be doing again at ACUW] but it was necessary to make several examples of using a slight bit of filter distortion in Photoshop to create full-color illustrations that jiggle enough to remove the icky rendering overtone - combined with the benefit of instant Photoshop previews.

Jeff's approach is quick and beautiful - Anyone with Photoshop should investigate this option. I feel the reward for a few minutes effort will yield better images than ArchiCAD's Sketch Render Tool.

[Dave Jochum]

Dwight wrote:
At my Sketch Render seminar at ACUE last year, it wasn't merely good enough to diss the Sketch Renderer [as I will be doing again at ACUW]...

I'm looking forward to your seminar at ACUW. Over the next few weeks, I'll be trying my hand for the first time at rendering with ArtLantis and Piranesi (while I read your book). I'd love to see more renderings posted here with discussions of technique.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Jefferson wrote:
Is this sort of what you mean Karl?

Yup. Nice image. I've done similar ones in Photoshop using the Sketch engine lines as you've done. As I said, I prefer the overshot lines - most visible in your deck steps (but I know from my own images that they are visible everywhere at full size) - to the kinds of lines that one can generate in Photoshop alone, even though I know my friend Dwight is fond of that technique. (To each our own 😉 )

But, since I know that David is going to give the Piranesi workshop at ACUWest, I was more curious of the kinds of things that might be possible with a rendered restore RGB chanel and the sketch engine output imported into the RBG chanel ... thus allowing selective painting of the Sketch as well as selective exposure of the underlying render. The difference that I see between this and doing the same thing in Photoshop is that Piranesi is surface and material aware, making painting through quick without masking ... and because it is geometry aware, things like half-tone patterns will take advantage of the angle of planes to the viewer, something just too tedious to attempt on very many planes in Photoshop. I suppose I could have tried something in the time it took to type this and here I was trying to be good and get back to work!

In the end, I would resort back to Photoshop for compositing still, I suppose, since Piranesi doesn't have layers to allow tweaking and adjusting a history of manipulations.

Karl