Computer Graphics

The course that teaches the digital-production pipeline of an interior designer — advanced 3D modelling, SketchUp extensions, textures and materials, lighting and cameras and rendering, and 2D post-production in Photoshop — and does it honestly, because no corner of design has more confident marketing than software. It is a deliberate companion to Computer Studio I and II, not a repeat: those introduced what a model and a render are; this is the production course, about how the tools actually work and where their claims outrun the truth. Two rules govern it. First, it NEVER quotes a software or hardware price — prices are region-gated, change constantly and are quickly wrong — so it teaches the stable licensing categories instead (free, open-source, free-tier, trial, paid, subscription, education) and the categorical hardware fact that real-time and ray-traced rendering need a dedicated GPU with real VRAM. Second, the software is a TOOL, not the design; a master with a pencil beats a novice with every plugin installed. From there it corrects the folklore, all from verified sources. SketchUp is a POLYGON (mesh) modeller built of edges and flat faces — its 'circle' is really a 24-sided polygon and its curves are faceted chords smoothed only for display, so it is not a NURBS modeller like Rhino and not native BIM; the segment count is a trade of smoothness against file weight. 'Parametric' design means geometry driven by rules and constraints (Grasshopper, Dynamo, or SketchUp extensions), so changing an input updates the model — it does NOT mean the computer designs for you, and it is NOT a synonym for blobby organic shapes. The named SketchUp extensions are community plugins with real, specific jobs — Curviloft (Fredo6) lofts a skin across curves, Bezier Spline / FredoSpline (Fredo6) draws editable spline curves, Shape Bender (Chris Fullmer) bends geometry along a path, and s4u Make Face (SUforYou) builds faces from edges — and you need a few well-chosen ones, not every plugin. In materials, a TEXTURE is a single bitmap while a MATERIAL is a full physically-based description of many maps (albedo, roughness, metalness, normal, height, ambient occlusion), so a JPEG of wood is not a wood material; and a texture must be mapped at its true real-world size, because wrong scale is the single commonest amateur tell. In rendering it separates real-time engines (Enscape, Twinmotion, D5, Lumion — fast and approximate) from offline ray-traced ones (V-Ray, Corona — slow and physically accurate), and drives home that 'unbiased' means converged to the correct image of the inputs you gave it, so a physically-accurate algorithm can still render a wrong-but-pretty room from wrong inputs — photoreal is not accurate and not good design. It states the most important correction of all precisely: the 'AI' in most 'AI renders' is an AI DENOISER (NVIDIA OptiX, Intel Open Image Denoise) that cleans the noise from a genuinely ray-traced image — it replaced the denoiser, not the renderer — whereas AI IMAGE GENERATORS (Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, sketch-to-render tools) hallucinate a plausible room that is not this specific designed space, useful for early mood but never a truthful deliverable, and no substitute for a designer's dimensional judgement. It closes on 2D post-production: raster (pixels) versus vector (maths) and why you cannot simply enlarge a raster; resolution and colour honestly; the file formats and why a layered master beats saving everything as JPEG; the fact that a professional render is legitimately post-produced with entourage, sky, grading and compositing; and the ethics line — presenting well is telling the truth beautifully, while faking impossible light, hiding a real column or inventing a view is misrepresentation. Throughout, every tool is named with its licensing category, never a price, and the folklore is named as folklore.