Sunday, October 7, 2012

Including Edge Lines in Renderings

I made a new image of a spaceship from the 3D Warehouse to demonstrate rendering of Edge Lines in IRender nXt


There are two ways to render Edge Lines - You can extract an image from SketchUp of just the edge lines, and then paste it on top of the rendered image or you can create 3D geometry from the edge lines, and add it to the model before rendering. ( IRender nXt can do either of these automatically.)

This image uses full 3D geometry. The full 3D edge lines are reflected properly in other geometry. The overlay of SketchUp edge lines would not be visible in reflections. 

Here is the same scene rendered without edge lines. You can see how the edge lines can be important for detail.


If you wanted edge lines for just part of the model, could identify which edge lines you wanted - e.g. by color - and then include only those edge lines. (IRender nXt contains a feature to only extract edge lines which have a color or material)