Our virtual home

I spent this past summer in London, on a 4 month hiatus from Chicago and from having any sort of permanent residence.  With all of my worldly belongings either in storage or in my rolling trunk, the summer was very streamlined!

With just my computer in lieu of my toolbox, I spent a lot of time polishing 3D CAD skills, plus learning the basics of photo-realistic rendering.  Over time, my growing homesickness and developing inventory of virtual furniture coalesced into a new project: modeling and rendering all of our furniture, then the new apartment in which it would soon reside.  I'm not sure how many hours this took, but it was many - all in all, the project spread over weeks (in between work days, of course).

The end results are below, including a couple of side-by-sides with the actual apartment as it exists today.  What you can immediately see is that details make all the difference; the pictures of our real apartment have a lived in feel - decorations, cards, flowers - that would have taken much, much more time to achieve in CAD.  That said, the furniture is pretty realistic, and perhaps best of all the model made for a VERY easy move, since we already knew where all the furniture went!

All of these models were made in SketchUp and rendered using SUPodium.  Also, thanks to wanderingfancies.blogspot.com, from which I stole the "real" pictures in the side-by-sides... you can see the full details of the move in here: http://wanderingfancies.blogspot.com/2010/09/transformation.html

At least one view I won't be able to get in the real world!