Blender as render engine for SU models

For me the road to rendering was with a lot of investment on time and also some money but not that much.

I faced it as a useful hobby and learnt while I went. In the end it paid off because now I use it for design iteration. We render more while designing and discussing, than for actual presentations.

In that sense, Thea rocks. It’s a very solid renderer. For what you want it is as simple as applying their standard thin glass preset, pushing a button and have Sketchup sun and sky filling the model with light, while you zoom and orbit in sketchup.

Then as you progress to more sophisticated PBR materials it’s progressingly realistic, then you learn about vegetation and entourage and suddenly your renders look like the real design and finally you learn about photography settings and framing and you hit the same render button, wait a lot more, and have a photo, not a render.

It’s as Vray, but simpler, faster, better integrated into sketchup and with incredibly realistic physically based render.

As this thread has moved somewhat off topic, I am going to start a new one about renderers.

From what I remember, there are a few people on the Blender subreddit who model in SketchUp & render in Blender. I wish I could find the post because they did such an amazing interior animation.

Personally, I switched from SketchUp to Blender because SketchUp discontinued SketchUp Make. And the old 2017 version isn’t compatible with my new computer’s graphics card. And it’s out of my budget. From my experience, Blender & SketchUp each have unique pros and cons for archviz. For example, SketchUp excels at architectural modeling & documentation, but Blender excels at photorealistic shaders and animation. In SketchUp, it’s easier to fill complex holes in geometry, make tangent arcs, and document measurements in a standardized format. Also, I think SketchUp has better add-ons for architecture. In Blender, it’s easier to make walls & window openings, make organic architecture, and document measurements in a non-standardized format (the show edge lengths overlay automatically dimensions your entire model instantly).You’ll have more tools available for specific circumstances if you choose to use both, rather than one or the other.

Honestly, Blender has a pretty steep learning curve because it has exponentially more tools to learn than SketchUp. Although, once you get over the curve, Blender starts to get easier. Don’t expect Blender to be able to do everything that SketchUp can do. Section planes, modeling tangent arcs, measuring radii, and design documentation tools aren’t really there. But you can expect to be able to model (in SketchUp if you want) & render amazing animations, in a timely manner, once you’re proficient in Blender.

I would advise you definitely learn some basic material editing in Blender if you plan to use it for renders. I preferences, enable the node wrangler add-on. Then in the shader editor, press shift+control+t to import a PBR material. You can get free PBR materials from textures.com. There are tons of other material tools, but that’s a “quick & easy” way to add materials.

If you want to make interior animations, then you’ll need to know basic animation tools. Basically, just move stuff around (like cameras or opening doors) and press the letter I to make keyframes. A pop up menu will come up and just choose “location, rotation, scale”. You can delete keyframes in the timeline with X. Some essential shortcuts are space to play your animation & shift+left arrow to return to the beginning of your timeline. Don’t let the fact that there are 1000 different buttons intimidate you. Although they’re mostly useful tools, you can safely ignore them.

If you’re modeling in SketchUp, then I agree you won’t need to know Blender modeling tools.

To import HDRI backgrounds, just add an environment texture to the background shader in the world shader editor & select your HDRI.
Screen Shot 2021-04-13 at 1.53.35 PM

I think Justin went over the other things you wanted in his tutorial he posted.

In my opinion, Blender is really good at doing architectural renders, especially with Eevee realtime rendering. But in some circumstances it requires certain very specific settings to be pressed to get the desired effect. To do it right, I’d advise against just “winging it” and trying to figure it out yourself. You really need to watch a tutorial to help you sift through witch settings are useful for your circumstance. People do some amazing archviz in Blender, so Blender is a good option for architectural renders.

Before Blender 2.8, Blender used to have a game engine. UPBGE is a fork of Blender Game Engine that has Eevee realtime rendering which is very good for archviz. Plus, UPBGE allows you to add game elements like an FPS camera to let people walk through your designs, interact with objects like doors, etc. My favorite thing about UPBGE & BGE (Blender Game Engine) is that it doesn’t require coding knowledge to make games. BGE has logic bricks which are much easier to learn than code. For example, to make character move forwards you just tell it to move forwards when W is pressed.

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That’s exciting!

To have a (free) render pipeline that’s optimized for the M1 makes a new Mac an even more enticing option — and could well make the required time investment (in learning a SU modelling / Blender rendering workflow) worthwhile.

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I came across another plugin today that’s really amazing for Photomatching called fSpy GitHub - stuffmatic/fSpy-Blender: Official fSpy importer for Blender

It can be very helpful for rendering your Arch Viz SketchUp models in a photo comp scene, it’s also free.

this was my first test, original photo:


3D model and render:

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Hi liamk887 and simoncbevans,

I found your discussion very helpful.

I am getting familiar with Blender as I was hoping that I could add aging and wear to the texture and re-import the model to SketchUp for the 2D drawing package…As well as perhaps learn to render in Blender and use the pictures to “sell the idea”.

I am coming from an architect background where I used ArchiCad, started 3D modelling there. Then in the office we started using Google SketchUp (my brother who worked for Google also recommend it at the time)…

Whilst home with my kids I learnt SketchUp very well and went back to the Film Industry/ set design lately.

My problem is that - suddenly - the majority of people started using Rhino (in the last 3 production that I worked for) and besides that it is possible to collaborate between Rhino and SketchUp , they choose not to. They are very aggressively pushing me to use Rhino.

I like to learn new softwares, but I can see very little benefit to switch to Rhino. It might be minor advantages (besides the very high cost of the software and the time invested), but I don’t see many things I can not do with SketchUp and I am quicker then them doing it too. Not to mention the need of “typing” which sound ridiculous…It does really frustrates me when people using Rhino undermine us SketchUp users without the actually knowledge of the sotware capabilities. I don’t understand…

I would rather learn Blender as it’s also have a good community and opens up a lot more options. And I am hoping that I could use it with SketchUp.

I would like sone thoughts from someone who uses all three softwares, if my thinking is right to go Blender instead of Rhino (beside of the short term advantage of collaboration).

I would like to learn them all of course, but as my time is limited, I have to prioritize.

I used to use Rhino and SketchUp but I have moved now entirely to Blender for the last two years. It was a bit of a step up to learn, but after 6 months I got into it pretty good.

I actually now use Unreal ‘to sell’ the models and ideas, I take models from clients in SketchUp, Rhino, Unreal, Max/Maya and more and render and animate them there.

Blender on it’s own is very powerful, here is my last image just a weeks work:

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your images are always great

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I’m an architect and I use both programs, I love both programs sketchup for it’s easy way of modeling and producing good documents together with layout and blender for its amazing capabilities for rendering and animation. Generally I use sketchup for modeling and getting the construction documents and I also use to make some renders but blender cycles can produce 100% realistic renders if you know how to set it up. Blender has a steeper learning curve than sketchup but once your familiarized with the program you learn faster.
Exporting from skp to blender and render directly there isn’t a good option all the time, some models can have a lot of problems and you could spend several hours trying to fix them, both program have a very different approach to modeling, sketchup uses faces from different shapes to form 3D objects while blender requires quads to be able to make a good use of its modifiers or having a good time making the UV unwrapping, if you thing that you just export a model apply some materials and render it you’re very wrong. Most of the times it’s better to model everything again in blender to avoid all those problems.
I think blender is a great tool but it can’t replace skp for architecture entirely, just for archviz it’s one of the best softwares out there.

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Can you help me understand this a bit more? What do you mean by “quads”? “Modifiers”? “UV Unwrapping”?

I looked at Blender briefly a long time ago, and lately I have been tempted to take another look. But I’m not really interested in spending a long time to learn a new philosophy of modeling, and I certainly don’t want to “model everything again in Blender”. Getting a nice render is simply not worth that to me. However, if it’s not that difficult to catch onto, I would consider checking out a few tutorials.

If you’ve used the subD plugin together with quad face tools you’ll have no problem on learning how to model in blender, it’s actually much easier to model complex organic geometry in blender than in sketchup, blender uses modifiers that can change or deform the geometry but without destroying the geometry, it’s simpler than it sounds, although blender has more than 50 modifiers I use only 5 or 6 for modeling architecture. I can’t explain how it works everything here but believe me it’s not complicated, at the beginning you could feel overwhelmed by its interface but once you get used to it you’ll find it very intuitive, not like sketchup but still intuitive. UV unwrapping is necessary when you use textures in blender, you need to unwrap it so you can set the correct scale or orientation, as well as the different maps of the texture like the normals map, distortion etc. there are addons that help you to download realistic materials or textures ready to use and with the facility to change all of that just on the shader editor with a few clicks. I would say it takes 2 weeks to get familiarized with the software and a month to feel comfortable using it, like any other 3D software it can take years to master but for archviz you don’t need to know every tool of the program, blender has a lot of features, it’s posible to make a movie on it but you don’t need to learn about rigging, complex sculpting or know all the nodes and shaders to make a good realistic render. If you plan to get into this amazing software I recommend you a YouTube channel called Polygon Runway, it’s one of the best for beginners and intermediate levels. Explaining you everything here would take a lot of time and space.