Sketchup Cities

Ray Tracey's latest blog post has Brigade 2 renders of a nice-looking walled city scene created using Google SketchUp. The model came from this gem of a collection by "LordGood" (who evidently is a big Assassin's Creed fan) hosted on Google 3D Warehouse.

Currently I only have a Blender exporter, and sadly the SketchUp-Collada-Blender path was producing garbage, but even the free version of SketchUp allows custom ruby plugins. After a bit of hunting around I found this OBJ exporter ruby plugin which worked very well, and now I have much nicer test meshes than my bad Blender programmer art.

The above images are from my usually-being-refactored path tracer with Preetham (et al) sun/sky. It doesn't render as quickly as Brigade 2 (also I only have a lowly GTX 460 to render on), and yes it's all diffuse and I haven't exported any of the textures, and there's no atmospheric terms or depth of field or shading normals or remote-controlled Stanford bunny, but it's nice to have some decent public domain data to use.

I'm slowly working on a Bidirectional Instant Radiosity post (hopefully using this scene) but it'll have to wait until work is less mental.