the hobby version is free now.
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Very subjective question. Also - depending on your needs, quite often you get what you pay for. I use iRenderNXT from renderplus systems for all my Architectural renders. Raylectron seems to have a nice package as wellā¦
Hi Julian, I have been using Podium for architectural renderings and I am considering a purchase, I am interested in the license if it is still available! - ryanc@smartroofnyc.com
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This is an old age question and I havenāt read all of the previous comments, nor am I going to, as I donāt want it to dilute my answer.
In our opinion there is only two(obviously their are may more and Iām am sure they are all good in there own way)
VRay (Without a doubt returns the highest quality renders within SketchUp if there is no time frames)
Shaderlight (In the real world you canāt spend days making renderings so this is the perfect option, All of the images rendered on this site are made with Shaderlight .www.fruntside.com and here are some really cool ones of a jeep wrangler http://www.fruntside.com/gopro-challenge.htm all made with Shaderlight
Best of luck with your renderings in SketchUp and if you have any questions, be sure to drop me a line
Cheers
Manu
Feel free to cast your vote on the best rendering extension for SketchUp!
- SU Podium
- Kerkythea
- Visualizer
- Vray
- Lumion
- Twilight Render
- Other
0 voters
Iāve been using Shaderlight for about three years. It produces very high quality renderings directly from Shetchup. It has a very simple user interface also. The company (ArtVPS ā ArtVPS.COM on the web) also provides optional cloud-based rendering for those with slower PCs.
I went through the same try and fail with about 5 different rendering plugins and the best in my opinion is Podium. Seems like I have to do a lot of tweeking in V-ray and some of the others to hit the render button and not like the tweeks and to have to start over. Podium seems to work without much tweeking
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I use Shaderlight by ArtVPS, Simple and has its limitations. But its affordable and does the job for simple previsual presentations.
As topic says, it seem like there is a ton of render program to chose from. Iv tried a little of V-Ray and it seems ok. The comunity seems big, and there is lots of videos on youtube on howto. Which is kind of important, so one does not have to spend lots of time learning. Though i find some stuff anoyingly confusing sometimes.And way to complicated. Sometimes i just want to add something simple and render. And then there is the price, quite expensive. Iv also looked at LumenRT which also seems expensive but good.
And finally the one im looking on more and more. Thea Render. Price is decent and it looks complex enough to keep me going. Many possibilities with it from the looks of it. But i canāt seem to find that many tutorials and howto on it. So how is it in use? For me lights is kind of important. So i can find out how lights work in a room etc.
I would like the lights to be easy to set up, like the possibility to adjust lumen/lux, angel of spotlight, kelvin color etc. So is this intuitive in Thea? I find it a little bit confusing in V-Ray sometimes. like spotlight angle. i Have some spots that are 35 dregree. but when i put that into vray it just makes a mess, 1.5 is more like 35 in real life.
And implemented material library. A decent library, render ready saves a lot of time. So how is that in Thea, Vray etc? Is there places to get/buy more at decent price?
So please if you use Thea or Vray or other render programs, share your knowledge. So it can help me chose which one to go for. Thanks.
I use V-Ray. The lighting is pretty complicated, but I love the texturing interface. I hear good things about LumenRT as well. Iāve never heard of Thea Render. I hear really good things about Maxwell Render as well. There are dozens to choose from. My advise, would be to check out the free trials that many of them offer, and see which one fits best for you. Make sure you check out the system requirements, as some of the programs have some pretty intensive requirements.
~~Drew
You are spot on when you say there are a ton of rendering apps / plugins out there. I like Shaderlight. It is not as configurable as many of the other rendering tools out there, but the trade off is ease of use. When I was looking at tools, aside from price I was looking for something that rendered plants and lights reasonably well on my lowly laptop and eventually landed on Shaderlight. I used E-on Vue for a while but it was like learning to fly a jet while performing heart surgery on a newborn (maybe a bit of an exaggeration).
What turned me off to some of the high-end renderers was when I worked on a project with a computer science student in grad school. He built his entire PhD dissertation around how sunlight ārendersā one leaf. It was really interesting but also quite scary of how many variables affect true photorealistic rendering. No matter how good the ābestā renderers are there will always be some other tool that comes along that usually has more settings to configure that will inch you closer to reality. I learned Shaderlight in an afternoon and said āGood enough for me!ā.
tl;dr shaderlight
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I use Kerkythea, mostly because it is free! It is easy to get a quick and dirty render, and can do some good stuff if you take the time to adjust textures and lights.
Hereās a list of those that play nice with SU
SketchUp Sage Site > Resources > Renderers
3D Basecamp 2012 - Rendering RoundUp
My favorites:
Kerkythea is a āsimply powerfulā free renderer.
Thea Render is a āstate-of-the-artā commercial renderer.
Both from Solid Iris Technologies
As you can see all renderers are good. Depending on the learning curve and money saving, the best in my opinion is PODIUM. Itās so simple and with itsā browser you can acheive with some practice excellent results as with high-end programs.
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Thanks for that video. Though it didnāt show much. But Thea and Podium looks like my thing. The guy fro V-Ray seemed like a jerk to high on his horse. Yes V-Ray looks good, but way to expencive when i compare them to Thea that is half price by example.
I will look more on Podium before i make my mind. And i will also test out Thea more as thea looks really good, the interface looks good. I got the basics working in Thea in less than a day. And it seems complex enought to āgeek outā on later on if i decide i want to tweak the render to perfection.
Five minutes is short to explain most any software package.
Perhaps itās best to consider the features of the software and not the presenter.
BTW, that morning Theaās designated presenter fell ill.
Fellow Sage, Gaieus, graciously assumed the role.
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My biased opinion is midrange priced; unbiased gpu rendering via Otoy Octane Render. Iāve used a lot of the others out there - Podium - extensively, Visualizer for quick ones, RenderIn and Demoād Thea, and Shaderlight.
Thereās a material library to get you started, and the results are in the realism. I canāt stress how much this renderer has changed my opinion of how rendering works within sketchup for the better. Its only requirement is you have a CUDA core, Nvidia card.
Check out some examples here - http://render.otoy.com/gallery2.php
You have to purchase the stand-alone to use the sketchup plug-in. It was about $560 CDN at the time (inclusive), based on conversion rate from Euro.
FluidRay RT is a real time renderer, and very reasonably priced. There is 15 day free trial too. FluidRay RT uses your processors / cores and doesnāt reply on any GPU. It is on sale in December 2014.
in my biased* opinionā¦ go for the non-biased Indigo
v4 is coming up with pure gpu rendering abilityā¦ openCL based as opposed to cuda so itās going to run faster on much more different hardware configs.
see preview at bottom of this page:
http://www.indigorenderer.com/indigo3.8
not to mention ā top quality renders with not tooo much fuss (relatively)
*not affiliated with the companyā¦ just a happy customer is all.