I took a timeout last Friday with a friend from school to sit down and try to master Podium, the rendering engine for SketchUp (well, one of several).
I have a masters in Engineering Physics and worked for 12 years as an optical engineer. And...I'm finding that only marginally helpful. I guess what makes these software programs tricky is the 7 to 15 minute rendering time each time you tweak a light or a setting means that overall progress towards optimizing your rendering is rather slow. But the results are starting to be pretty amazing. For comparison, see the SketchUp/Photoshop versions from this post.
I'm still working on a couple of these. I blatantly cheated at getting more light into the second perspective by making the ceiling transparent, which makes the shadows not rigorously correct, for example. And I'd like to increase the brightness and contrast in the entrance perspective (which may just be a Photoshop job).
Anyway, for this former Optical Engineer, one thing is certain: Messing with light rendering engines is pretty addictive and it was hard to pull myself away to work on other things! I could easily do this all day. It's a really fun fusion of my former and future careers.
I'm still working on a couple of these. I blatantly cheated at getting more light into the second perspective by making the ceiling transparent, which makes the shadows not rigorously correct, for example. And I'd like to increase the brightness and contrast in the entrance perspective (which may just be a Photoshop job).
Anyway, for this former Optical Engineer, one thing is certain: Messing with light rendering engines is pretty addictive and it was hard to pull myself away to work on other things! I could easily do this all day. It's a really fun fusion of my former and future careers.
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