Stained Glass Problems

Now that part of the second floor of the Belvedere done, I have the opportunity to create my first Wright stained glass window. While I don't have good photos or drawings of what these tall narrow windows were supposed to look like, I had enough info in other places to make an educated guess. They seemed to be nothing more than a grid of squares, some of them colored. I decided to make the colored portion red, and I think it looks very festive. Here is what it looks like in Sketchup:



One of the things I like about how the model looks in Sketchup are the colors. The brick is the pale cream color I wanted (it's a standard Sketchup color called 'lemon chiffon') and I got a really nice bright red for the glass (color A06 and I played with the transparency). This is all great until you put it in IDX renditioner.



Part of the problem here is that the window is mostly in shadow, but the colors are a little off. This is going to be a problem with any renditioner and I've noticed that IDX has a tendency to either intensify or dull colors. Here, as in all my renderings, the brick is more yellow than I'd like (I can never tell how bad it is. On my home computer it isn't that yellow, but at work it looks like a lemon.) and the red is a little dull. This only becomes a real problem when we go inside.





See how dull the image is in IDX? And see how the red glass doesn't let light pass through it at all? I have to admit, I'm pretty disappointed. I did some research, and it is apparently impossible to do stained glass like I imagined with IDX renditioner. On the IDX design forum, they addressed this and apparently it won't be a feature of IDX any time soon.

http://forums.idx-design.com/index.php?topic=129.0

This means that I am ultimately going to have to find another renditioner. I'm disappointed as I like IDX's ease of use. But art glass was an extremely important design feature at Midway Gardens and I just can't imagine making the renderings without it looking realistic. I have a vision of the low sun coming in through the wall of stained glass doors in the promenade and casting their colors around like a cathedral. It will be wonderful, but I can't do it with IDX Renditioner.

In the mean time, I am still going to play around with IDX. One of the things I'm going to have to adjust is the reflectivity of the yellow brick. On the inside image of the windows, see how the right one has a yellow glow to it? That's light reflecting off the brick outside. I'm not too worried about it at this point, though.