The Joker

SketchUp's Real-Time Rendering Moment: Lumion View, AI Render, and the End of the Export Workflow

SketchUp 2025–2026 has added native PBR materials, AI image generation, and real-time rendering plugins like Lumion View, letting archviz artists produce photorealistic images without leaving the viewport. This collapses the traditional design-to-render pipeline.

The Joker

The low-resolution base meshes for this project were created in Maya, to be exported to ZBrush for sculpting. I generated mid-frequency displacement maps to capture the main shapes and smoothness; high-frequency normal maps were generated to capture the details like skin pores and wrinkles. Texture maps were made between ZBrush, Photoshop. The hair system was done in Maya Paint FX and rendered in Maya Software and composited with the rest of the scene, rendered with Mental Ray.

Software: Maya, ZBrush, Mental Ray

Posted on 26.01.2017