Eighty scenes before the coffee got cold

We build these tools inside a working interior design studio, which means every claim on this site eventually has to survive one of our own deadlines. This one is from an apartment project of ours that had reached the point every project reaches: the model was ready, the client meeting was booked, and somebody had to produce the complete scene set — every room from the centre and from the corners at eye height, plus the elevations — for the review PDF and for render prep.

That sentence used to describe an afternoon. This is what the afternoon looked like, and what replaced it.

The afternoon, as it used to be

Building a scene by hand is not difficult. It is five small actions, none of which can be skipped:

• Orbit into the room and position the camera roughly where a person would stand.
• Frame the shot — walk the camera back until the wall you care about fits.
• Set the eye height, because SketchUp's camera drifts vertically every time you orbit.
• Add the scene.
• Rename it in the tray, because Scene 47 helps nobody three weeks later.

With practice, and when nothing goes wrong, the loop takes about two and a half minutes per scene. On a set of eighty scenes that is over three hours of camera-clerk work — three hours in which no design decision is made, no problem is found, and the only skill exercised is patience. It is also exactly the kind of work that gets compressed when the deadline is close, which is how scene sets end up with three rooms covered properly and the rest covered from the doorway.

Preparing the room list

Scene Director works from a room list, which it reads from the model's groups and tags. Our apartment models are already organised that way for documentation, so the guided setup was mostly confirmation: walk through the list, check that every room is present and named the way the client will read it, correct the two that were not. This is the honest prerequisite — the tool automates the cameras, not the model discipline. A model where the kitchen is a loose soup of ungrouped geometry will need tidying first, and should have been tidied anyway.

The run

Then the part that gives this article its title. Scene Director generated the full set — around eighty scenes on this project; depending on the room count it places 80 to 120 camera scenes in about a minute. Centre views and corner views, all at eye height, all named by room, all as native SketchUp scenes. Nothing proprietary sits between you and the result: close the extension and the scene tabs are still ordinary scenes, editable and deletable like any you made by hand.

The contact-sheet pass

A generated camera is a good guess, not a composition. The photo viewer lays every scene out as a contact sheet, the way photographers used to review a roll of film, and this is where the human work now happens: flick through, keep what reads well, re-aim what does not, change the lens where a tight bathroom needs a wider angle. On this project we culled and re-aimed a handful — a corner view blocked by a wardrobe, a centre view that stared at a door edge. Minutes of judgment instead of hours of clicking, which is the correct ratio.

Materials, before anyone renders

Scene prep on this project fed straight into rendering, which is where a second, quieter feature earned its keep. Scene Director renames materials ordered by surface area, biggest first — so the top of the material list is the wall paint and the oak floor, not Color M07 and a texture named by a manufacturer's export script. It also strips unused materials while it is there. Whoever sits down to render starts from a list that reads like a specification instead of an archaeology dig.

Out the door

The last step was PNG export for the client PDF. Scene Director can produce sketch previews or a full render package; for a review round, sketch previews are the right weight — enough to discuss layout and sightlines, unpolished enough that nobody mistakes them for finals. The exported set dropped into our review document in the order the scenes were named, which is to say the order of the rooms, which is to say the order the client walks the flat.

What actually changed

No before-and-after chart, because we did not run this project twice. What we can report is structural:

• Scene sets stopped being scheduled work. Nobody blocks an afternoon for cameras any more; the set is generated when the model is ready and regenerated when it changes.
• Regenerating replaced patching. When a wall moved, the old habit was to nurse the affected scenes by hand. Now the set is simply rebuilt, because rebuilding costs a minute and patching costs an argument about whether scene 34 was updated.
• Coverage stopped depending on the deadline. The last room in the flat gets the same centre-and-corners treatment as the first, because the tool does not get tired at scene sixty.
• Render prep starts clean. The renamed, pruned material list means the render session begins with rendering.

The coffee, for the record, was still warm. The review pass outlived it — but that pass was design judgment, applied to eighty framed views of our own project, which is a reasonable way to spend a coffee's second half.