I have been tasked by the Marketing Director of my company to create 3D floor plans for the apartment communities that we manage. After downloading the trial, I created a floorplan and things went fairly well. I have a few questions now.
1. I couldn't seem to find closet shelving elements, or interior house plants. But this is not a huge concern as I did experiment with importing objects from other programs.
2. Is there a way to swing open the door elements? Never mind. I figured it out.
3. Is there a list of all the elements currently placed in the scene that you could browse through and select a specific element?
4. The thing that I found to be the most troubling and had the most difficulty with is the lighting of the model. I was able to turn off the sun and set up some other lighting fixtures to light the scene, but all the lights cast shadows. Is there a way to have a specific light cast no shadows? Is there a way to soften the shadows that are cast by the lights? Which leads into my next question.
5. Are there any other rendering engine plugins? Must every rendering be done with Raytrace?
6. Could the scene be exported and used in a different program that has a higher degree of control over the lighting and cameras, like 3D Studio Max?
I really like TurboFloorPlan for the speed of building a model floor plan, and ease of use. The thing I am struggling the most with is the cameras, lights, and rendering engine.
Here is my the results of my first experiments.
(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5176/5393591985_f2170ec707.jpg)
Yes you can export a full model or parts in a couple formats for use to render in other 3D programs....tho generally you get colors, not materials/textures...so you need to not only setup lighting but also all the materials settings for every item in the other program...big job if a complex design.
See file/export and help file.
Hi DixonmGrfx
Welcome to the forum.
First, congratulations on your first model
Thanks for the input fellas.
The cameras just took me a bit to learn how to move them around the scene and set the FOV so that I like the results. That's it really.
Once you pointed out the shelves, I did do a face-palm. Certainly I could have found it if I had bothered to really look hard.
I did try experimenting around with the plants. Unfortunately the ones I tried had little to no geometry that is visible from the top down perspective. So I imagine that it's going to be a bit of a seek and find to download good house plant models.
The rendering settings made a huge difference with the output and quality of the images. Thanks. Still, even with all the tips about the lighting and tweaks, I had a very difficult time getting the right balance of coverage. I couldn't find where the lights could be color corrected.
In the end I did export the scene and setting up the lights and camera in another rendering engine. It was really not that problematic as far as the textures went once I added the path to the texture directory that TurboFloorPlan uses. I did need to remap some of the objects, but that was fairly simple. I think with a little trail and error I can setup a fairly seamless pipeline for moving the scene out of TFP for final render.
The goal is to get to a proficiency level that the creation of a floor-plan from start to final rendered image takes a maximum of 3 hours. Before I gave TFP a test-drive, I believed that objective was unattainable. I think in the end, it will be faster and yield better results to build in TFP and set up lights and cameras in a different rendering software.
Here is a side by side comparison of yesterday's results and the results from today's experiments.
(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5176/5393591985_f2170ec707.jpg)(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5253/5396093773_b1646c5a73.jpg)
The walls are still a bit over exposed, but with a bit more tweaking, I think it will turn out really good.
Hi again,
The render using Advanced certainly looks more real (not that it is very real to look into a furnished house from overhead with the roof off - especailly if it is raining!!).
Photoboard trees do not render from overhead as you have found. You may find the 2D Designers View or 3D Quick View (overhead) may do what you want but they do not use lighting - but the plants do have a 2D profile when used in 2D view. You could also possibly create BMP images of plants to use from overheard, setting the part of the image you want to be transparent to Magenta (RGB 255, 0, 255) - I have tried this in the second image as a texture on a rug. You may only need one or two for your purposes. If you put the 'plant top rugs' and photoboard (landscape) plants on separate Building Locations then you can turn the plant rugs off if you are doing any eye level renders and turn the landscape plants on. Also in the image is a 3DS image. It throws a shadow of course while the 'rug' version doesn't.
You can import 3DS models of plants but bear in mind that these can be very memory intensive, especially if they are high quality models with lots of leaves. I have attached a couple that may help if you want to try them instead. Images, as on the rug are only linked, so do not add to the file size, while the 3DS becomes part of the model, so it can baloon in size and become very slow to edit.
I have attached an image with the instructions for editing the light settings (to lower the bulb and to change the colour). For overhead view such as you are doing you could try using 2 bulbs in each fitting one set lower than the other and it will even the light down the wall. From overheard you are not getting the reflection for light from the ceiling to even out the lighting a bit. You can of course you additional lighting for overhead views iside the rooms and even high overhead. If you make the light fitting tiny and transparent you will not see them.
Hope those additional thoughts help.
Allan
There are a couple free "plant" creator programs to make your own .3ds files if you can't find what you want via www. Search for Plant Studio.
You can import stuff from SketchUp....so look thru their library...including .skp files
You can simplify .3ds files to make them smaller for your use here because high accuracy geometry probably not needed.
Also....you can add more lights (to control shadows anywhere) without seeing the light fixture by making everything except the red box bulb/light source transparent....very useful for specific light control/artistic/presentation, instead of pure realism
And don't forget you can improve final renders with post processing in Photoshop or similar....often much faster/easier than doing many renders. Also you can do more than one TFP render showing different things and then blend them into one final result using Photoshop.