SU Podium contest winner announced

Nomer Adona is the 1st place winner of the Podium 4th image contest which ended earlier this summer (view all entries here.)

Nomer is an international teacher in Vietnam teaching Design and Visual Arts in Ho Chi Minh City. He is also a freelance architect and interior designer. He loves teaching because it gives him free time to pursue other personal interests, painting and art.

In a former life, Nomer worked full time for a big architectural firm in Malaysia. But after landing an international teaching job in Vietnam he swears he won't go back. From time to time he does receive architectural visualization work from various international clients.

He found using Google SketchUp and SU Podium, a photo-realistic rendering plug-in, to be good visualization tools for studying viewpoints, texture, and lighting before painting. The example below is of the winning SU Podium image and how it came to fruition.




The first image shows a model used prior to rendering in SU Podium. You can see this interior design has a lot of high resolution textures. Many of the textures were created by Nomer using a digital camera and shooting typical building scenes from Hanoi. Some of the components in the scene came from the Google 3D Warehouse as well.

The second image shows the rendering that was created by Podium. A background image is imported into the SketchUp model for the view from the door. The main source of light is Podium’s sunlight which is controlled by SketchUp’s shadow settings. Podium’s soft shadows are used in this rendering. Because Podium supports ray tracing and global illumination, faces that are not exposed to direct sunlight reflect indirect light, making the interior look realistic.

Also, large openings in the SketchUp model (not visible in the image) in the roof and back wall are used to create ambient light from Podium’s sky light. Some textures were applied to Podium’s bump maps.

Using SketchUp and Podium for oil painting studies, as opposed to architectural design concepts and presentations, may not be the most common use of these tools, but for Nomer, they worked quite well. His work shows that 3D design and photo-realistic rendering have numerous, creative applications.

Posted by Tasha Danko, Google SketchUp Team