What do the checkmarks mean? I did use Maxwell a long time ago, and I still have LightUp. LightUp sort of is real time, in that it takes some time to give you a rendered looking scene, but then you can move around the scene without having to render again.
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Mac or Win. Maxwell, Indigo, and Twilight are also available on both platforms. I think LightUp too.
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Still missing AmbientOcclusion and Simlab
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There a wide range of rendering engines, which all suit different purposes.
If your purpose is “photorealism” (and that means fully ray-traced with atmospherics, complex shaders and materials, and a real physics-based illumination model) then your options include: Maxwell, Vray, Thea, Indigo, Arnold, Octane, etc. Indigo is the cheaper of the bunch (RT version) and is very fast and simple to use, however the SketchUp interface isn’t very intuitive or feature-rich. Thea looks pretty good but I haven’t tried it.
If you want fast near-realtime rendering and are prepared to accept lower image quality then may be Twilight, Podium could work as they have good SketchUp interfaces.
If you want the most built-in features with the best SketchUp interface, then possibly Vray.
If you want realtime rendering then Twinmotion, Enscape and Lumion
Personally I would recommend Twinmotion for basic image quality, features and price.
One thing I would recommend is a GPU-Based renderer. I’ve tried CPU, CPU+GPU and GPU-only on a range of different systems including some very high end rendering farms, and the GPU-only mode is so much faster! Decent renders in 2 minutes flat and it makes rendering of fly-through animations much more acheivable.
My advice is to try a Demo of Indigo because it is available for Mac and it runs using OpenCL which Radeon cards are built around (as opposed to Cuda which is nvidia-specific). It will at least give you something to base decisions on. And get hold of a demo copy/free version of Twinmotion - 2019 was offered free, and 2020 is currently 50% off so it’s a good deal for a realtime engine WITH inbuilt materials and 3d assets.
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Add Adobe Dimension to the list, if you have other reasons to need Creative Cloud.
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Yes, definitely, it’s now my go-to visualisation software. You do need a beefy mac to run it full bore but it is very quick to get images and animations out of it. It has a learning curve and you need to employ some trickery but it is good and now that is owned by Epic it should get better and better.
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As usual Justin has plenty of useful information available. He has a whole YouTube channel dedicated to rendering.
Here’s a pile of vids about TwinMotion:
Dang, I wish I’d been around back when TwinMotion was free.
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I would also add that the vegetation system in TM2020 really is a game changer in quickly populating your scenes.
It’s also worth clarifying that all this does not happen ‘within’ sketchup like you would expect with an off-line Renderer like Vray or Maxwell - you send your scene to twinmotion via a link plugin.
Yes very easy to use but sloooooooooooooooooow
I’m in no particular hurry. I can have it render while I’m doing something else. This took about 45 minutes to fully render on my MacBook Pro:
Dimension does support GPU rendering with RTX boards I believe, certainly at least for the preview render.
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OK but I meant as in comparison to something else like Simlab. I’ll have to do a test on a SU model in Dimension on my RTX based box at work tomorrow just to see if it does use the GPU. There was an update to it last week and I haven’t tried it since.
Very nice and helpful rundown AK_SAM!
I’ll look at Indigo and Twinmotion … appreciate your insights!
I’m currently running Enscape on a 2014 iMac via bootcamp on an external SSD. Both Windows and Enscape run pretty well on a 6 year old iMac.
I find Enscape very intuitive to use.
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Hi All,
It’s been about six days since I posted my (perhaps overly ambitious) inquiry about the “10 best” rendering programs for SketchUp. Many thanks to all of you for your responses! I must say that I didn’t realize just how many SU friendly rendering programs are out there!
I have tried to compile the responses into as comprehensive a list as I can manage. There are still a lot of (noted) blanks and question marks in the list, but I’ve made some progress. I offer my summary out to you here as a work in progress, please edit, modify, and rearrange to improve the accuracy and overall utility, and then reissue so that we can all benefit.
As has been noted by several contributors, the SU Essentials web site has a lot of rendering reviews (not all of which I have reviewed), and I found the web site easyrenders.com helpful as well.
As noted in the list, I’m still a bit unclear about which category (operating inside or outside of SketchUp) some of the listings belong in … any correction help would be most appreciated!
And then, at the end of the list, I ran out of gas and have not categorized the last five (I think more obscure) items …
I’m hoping that if the collective Forum has any energy for this, we can end up with a realitively current feature list of rendering programs available for SketchUp. After this list sorts out, I may be able to get back to my “top 10” idea …
Thanks again!
SU - Rendering Programs 2.pdf (104.1 KB)
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After suggesting Twilight a few times I now feel obligated to report that, so far at least, I’ve been unable to get anything at all useful out of it. I’m following Justin’s tutorial with great patience, but so far, no go…
I’ve also noticed that when Twilight is installed SketchUp Make won’t quit, and has to be forced quit.
My first attempt to render, so hopefully the problem is me.
Perhaps someone can upload a test SU model so we can compare the different rendering engines?
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why additional lists with my exhaustive list already being available (see above) and additionally burried in a PDF not accessible directly in a post or via the forums search and which could impose a security risk (unknown creator) too?
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SU Podium has had that same problem for a while (on MacOS), though, the most recent version of it in the most recent version of SU may have finally fixed that. I can’t confirm that just yet.
I agree about having it in an open format but I also like the commentary in regards to the features / implementations.
BTW your ‘exhustive list’ er, 
isn’t exhaustive.
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why not just comment in a post.
btw, much more exhaustive than the other lists and additionally not listing nonsense as other CAD applications (CATIA… really).