Let me introduce my self...I am Mary and am a complete Sketchup/Rendering virgin so to speak. I had never worked with 3D graphics, animation or rendering before I downloaded Sketchup a few months ago. I am trying to teach myself the art. I am not an architect or designer in anyway, just a paralegal trying to make herself more valuable to her litigation firm. I am hoping to eventually be able to make 3D representations of accident scenes for use as exhibits at mediations, trial, etc.
Having said that. I have made a pretty good start. I have a good attempt at a first model and have introduced animation, via the "proper animation" plugin, to go with it. I would like to attempt to start rendering. I have bought the Twilight program and am attempting to learn the program but it seems a little over my head. I get the general concept, just not how to apply the ideas.
So here's my suggestion. A very basic tutorial or two for absolute beginners to rendering. Here are some of the questions I have about it as a beginner. (1) If I have several scenes made, do I have to redo my rendering in each scene or will the render be automatically applied to all scenes at once? (2) If I am working on rendering a model, do I totally turn off the information under the animation tab, do my work, render it and then go back and save as an animation? (3) When I've tried to render a few surfaces, nothing happens...what have I done wrong? It seems as if I read in the manual there are differnt things you have to do depending on whether a surface is painted or textured thru Sketchup, is this right? (4) If I have a large model, is it going to take as long to render the surface changes as it is to save the animation?(which appears very time consuming) (5) When saving animation I see every frame is saved as a seperate jpeg to my computer. If I have hundreds of frames, is this going to clog up my computer? (6) If I render a model in another program such as SU Podium, will the rendering show up thru Twilight?
I could go on and on...lol. However, let's just say that any help is appreciated but sometimes when I ask (not just on this forum) people forget what it's like to be an absolute beginner and the answers go over my head. For example on the first page of the Twilight User Manual it says there are Multiple Render Methods, Biased and Unbiased, I don't know what those terms mean in reference to Twilight. We need some kind of tutorial that assumes someone knows virtually NOTHING about rendering that will get us started. I know a lot of it is just trial and error and playing around with the program, that's how I've learned Sketchup for the most part, but a little push in the right direction never hurts
This is just a suggestion and I'm sorry the post was so long. Thanks for listening and I look forward to working with everyone in the future.
Mary
