Friday
Jan122007
Google SketchUp 6 & Photo Match
Friday, January 12, 2007 at 4:25PM I wrote a bit in The Guide about using the free Google SketchUp as a planning tool for shoots. Version 6 was just released, and it has some great new features. By far the coolest is Photo Match—I see all kinds of potential here for filmmakers.
Reader Comments (11)
But...
Do you want to be tied to a application server all the time?
MS would love this for its products...Google too
Not sure what you mean SalaTar... Google SketchUp is a standalone app, not a web app like Google Docs.
it will be
Shees then don't use it salatar. Thank for the heads up stu.
i've been following sketchup's development since around v1.1
i always saw huge potential for it among film makers and storyboarders.
glad to see its finally making it there.
j
SalaTar - do you know that for a fact, or is that supposition? This kind of application makes less sense for web based app, too much data to shuttle around, even on broadband (like those nutty web based video editing apps...sheesh!).
For the meantime, it is free and standalone, so use it. If they change it...just don't upgrade so long as it runs on your hardware and OS.
-mike
Stu:
I've only had three days with the Guide (thank you for word that that March date was bogus; indeed true) but within 3 minutes I'd page-flipped through and noticed the boards with Google SketchUp.
I don't know how I managed to miss this app these past years, especially with Google involved (as I generally think most Google brandedness rocks UI-wise and quickly adopt)...but man, after only 1 day of tutorials and tinkering around, I will be using this a LOT. And that's beyond any rebel filmmaking (though I still want to explore the use of human figures a bit more for boarding; I have yet to see posable figures inside the app; I'm assuming you tap a library of pre-built, pre-posed dudes, which is, well, okay but not glorious for boarding. Better yet if there's some Poser-esque way of doing it I have yet to discover.) And Photo Match seems rather ideal for camera projection madness (and I'm already a bit of a cam_proj madman).
But heck, for the wanna-be architect in me, this thing rules. We were in the act of planning new living room furniture and less than two hours of newbieness and I had a scale model of my wacky multi-level living room and three couch choices modeled, all scale-accurate.
Anyway, KILLER tip. I'm loving the Guide in general, but kinda savoring rather than blasting through it. Even though I think I kinda generally know a lot of this info (as someone who's kept an ongoing eye on Prolost and nearby terrain), it's still great to be re-inspired and re-invigorated, and I have a feeling the DVD material and little tidbits like this SketchUp tip are going to add up to be rather thick icing on an already tasty cake.
Kudos, man.
Hey Zane, glad you're digging The Guide! Your thoughts about SketchUp mirror mine—some kind of poser-like functionality would be great for storyboarding. Both the simple posing and the mix-and-match actor building.
Well, after another day of tinkering, I'm deciding that Poser 4 characters (or even Poser 2 characters) exported via 3DS and brought into Sketchup provide the fastest and cleanest flow for me.
Any newer version of Poser (heaven forbid 7) and your geometry on import is just way too big or necessary. Of course, you're kinda composing cameras twice to even bother doing this. Once in Poser and then again in SketchUp, or you're jumping back out to Poser to tweak the model...so this is still less than ideal. But Poser has the correctly simple posing needed for a human form, and SketchUp has both the right rendering and the dang easy set extension and UI.
If Google would just add simple male/female forms as crude and posable as the original Poser 4 models, we'd be set. (Let's all go request that, eh?)
That said, I love the minimal sketch style of these boards. Might be worth the back and forth even; it's pretty dang fast to board this way, once you know a minimum curve in both apps. And with all the props and starting poses available in Poser, heck, maybe it's worth it.
Two issues I'd love to see improved: I think I might need the Pro version of SketchUp just for the new LayOut features for printing. It annoys me that SketchUp doesn't seem to save my window dimensions, so if I compose to a 16:9 window, it doesn't recall that. Also, it would be nice if it wouldn't reset camera ROLL when you orbit without holding the option key down. I'm a sucker for dutched cameras, and other than saving the cam position as a Scene, I've blown away my dutch often while fine-tuning a shot. At least that's my take so far.
Hmm...I may have to blog about this later, maybe post some of my quick sample boards... ;-)
Please do Zane! And know that folks at Google's SketchUp officies in Boulder are reading these comments.
Glad to hear that about Google Boulder, Stu.
Well, here's some quickies. Nothing too fancy, but I'm personally psyched at how fast this can be for rough boarding that looks waay better than my typical chicken-scratch stick-figures. (Not that you need more than chicken-scratch, of course, as you so wisely point out in the Guide. But as a visual kinda guy, it's always annoyed me that I can't quickly whip out kick-ass boards.)
My current film blog http://rzanerutledge.com/2.5/film/film.html">is here.