Note: This image has been highly compressed and does not accurately represent the full rendering quality of ElectricImage.
I had a little dilemma on my hands. I needed to create some 'sketch' views of this rendering for some marketing materials. The client was looking for the style of traditional ink sketches that are very popular in many home plan books. There was only one problem. I can't sketch one of those by hand to save my life!
Fortunately, I had built a cool 3D model of the house for a full color rendering, and with a little help from some EI friends, I found a way to get that ink sketch look. Read on to find out what I did. I'm still refining this....as this is v1.0 of this process, but it should get you started. :o)
This is basically what I started with. A huge model of the house complete with trees, shrubs and landscape (almost 3 million polys...glad EI eats polys for breakfast). For this process to work, in this circumstance, real geometry must be present. And they thought I was crazy for modeling all this detail, huh?
The first step is to create a material that will give you a ink sketch sort of look. The best way is to create a master material and set it up. Then you can simply link all the objects in your project to this master material. Remember make a new copy of your project file so you don't mess up the one with all the cool different textures.
This can be done by the following (thanks to Bernd for some of the material settings for this one.):
Geometry Tab: Set up as shown below. You can play with the Thickness settings to your taste.
Luminance Tab: set the color to 100% white and give it full luminance value.
Diffuse Tab: Set color to 100% white. (I don't know if this is necessary, but when I had it at other colors, I could see color artifacts at some places in the preview, even with diffuse turned to 0.)
What you should now have should look something like this:
As you can see, there is a slight problem. You can't see what to aim the camera at. Yikes! But don't fear, see the next page for a solution to this problem and more...
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