Trying to find a simple, cheap, effective program for city renderings for School.

[angels27]

A project I am working on is an analysis of my hometown from multiple perspectives. Demographic, and geographic information are to be used among other things.

Part of the project calls for renderings of the most profound public space within the City. My hometown is Rochester, NY. I am looking for a program that would provide me the ability to make renderings of the downtown area of the city which I feel is the most profound space. I am curious as to whether there is a program that I could import city Layouts and then performs analysis on them. Or will I have to draw everything from scratch?

I would like to have some renderings of the downtown area as a whole. And be able to create 3d images on my computer.

I have a MAC so there are some program limitations also I am not looking to spend a whole lot of money but I will spend some if it is worth it.
And if the program is user friendly that is a plus.
I have been suggested about google sketchup but that program would require me to draw everything from scratch it seems.



Thanks for the help,

[Raf]

A project I am working on is an analysis of my hometown from multiple perspectives. Demographic, and geographic information are to be used among other things.

Part of the project calls for renderings of the most profound public space within the City. My hometown is Rochester, NY. I am looking for a program that would provide me the ability to make renderings of the downtown area of the city which I feel is the most profound space. I am curious as to whether there is a program that I could import city Layouts and then performs analysis on them. Or will I have to draw everything from scratch?

I would like to have some renderings of the downtown area as a whole. And be able to create 3d images on my computer.

I have a MAC so there are some program limitations also I am not looking to spend a whole lot of money but I will spend some if it is worth it.
And if the program is user friendly that is a plus.
I have been suggested about google sketchup but that program would require me to draw everything from scratch it seems.



Thanks for the help,

Since you are a college student are the cheap, effective labor for said renderings. hehe.

With all that being said, probably the easiest way to do a quick "sketchy" rendering would be take a picture of a space then take it to photoshop and use the "sketch" filter and toy from there.

Other than that, your out of luck. No program will do what your asking for. To 3D render, you need sketch-up. It is quicker if you paid for the "pro" version, which allows you to import aerials, which you can import into cad and do basic line drawings, then render up utilizing proper scale, etc.

This is truly an opportunity for you to master something and make it into a "skill". Take the opportunity, learn how to do it and market yourself.

You could "pay" someone to do this, but really it's in your best interest to learn it. By the time you do all this fun "rendering" in a computer, you more than likely could have sketched the whole thing out already and give it the "sketch" look, which imo always looks better than the computer rendered crap. But it all depends on your skills.

Good Luck my son (or daughter).

[nrschmid]

1. Take photographs of the site and print hard copies. They need to be clear images, color or black and white doesn't matter. I recommend something larger such as letter size photos as you will be tracing over them with pens.
2. Buy a small roll of tracing paper from an art supply store (12 inches or so), drafting tape, a 1-2 Micron pens 08 or smaller and a black Pentel sign pen.
3. Cut a piece of trace paper and attach to the corners of the photo with the drafting tape. Mark at least 2-3 points on the trace for reference, such as the corner of a building, the edge of window, and preferably on opposite ends of the trace. If the trace gets loose when inking, you can move it back in the correct place.
4. Trace over the photographs with the pens. Thicker pens should be uses around the edges of buildings, and finer pens are used for windows, doors, etc.
5. Scan the trace paper at school and send to your email account as JPEG, TIFF, PDF, whatever. The drawing should be black ink.
6. Open the image in an image editing software. For simplicity I will use Photoshop.
7. Convert the image to Grayscale, and then convert it again as a Bitmap. The image should be crisp black lines with a white background.
8. Use the wand tool to start selecting areas in between the black lines and recolor manually, like a Paint-by-Numbers.

Voila you have a hand-drawn and rendered image.

[Raf]

1. Take photographs of the site and print hard copies. They need to be clear images, color or black and white doesn't matter. I recommend something larger such as letter size photos as you will be tracing over them with pens.
2. Buy a small roll of tracing paper from an art supply store (12 inches or so), drafting tape, a 1-2 Micron pens 08 or smaller and a black Pentel sign pen.
3. Cut a piece of trace paper and attach to the corners of the photo with the drafting tape. Mark at least 2-3 points on the trace for reference, such as the corner of a building, the edge of window, and preferably on opposite ends of the trace. If the trace gets loose when inking, you can move it back in the correct place.
4. Trace over the photographs with the pens. Thicker pens should be uses around the edges of buildings, and finer pens are used for windows, doors, etc.
5. Scan the trace paper at school and send to your email account as JPEG, TIFF, PDF, whatever. The drawing should be black ink.
6. Open the image in an image editing software. For simplicity I will use Photoshop.
7. Convert the image to Grayscale, and then convert it again as a Bitmap. The image should be crisp black lines with a white background.
8. Use the wand tool to start selecting areas in between the black lines and recolor manually, like a Paint-by-Numbers.

Voila you have a hand-drawn and rendered image.

Did we meet in school?

[ColoGI]

Did we meet in school?

That's what we learned too.

At any rate, if the poster can't use a school computer and for some odd reason can't get a *gasp* pirated copy, Paint.NET is a serviceable free alternative to PhotoShop. Not that I endorse pirated software.