Its not my list but I thought the commentary is useful for forum members.
1 Like
Hey, sorry if I’m duplicating … if this is claimed territory, I apologize!
As for the PDF format, that’s my lack of know how … it was the only way I could figure out to post with intact formatting … a simple copy and paste into a reply lost formatting and was a mess! Please educate me on how to drop a “editable”, format intact Page document into this form, and I’ll gladly do it!
Yes, your list is very good! I was simply trying to add some additional comments to each entry to add some dimension, background, and clarity to the choices …
Exhaustive can be exhausting, for sure!
Hmm that 45 minute “preview” rendering looks very flat. There are no reflections, or induced hues. The background colours do not relate to the foreground at all. Even the shadows are one dimensional. But I suppose it is depicting a wooden model!
Perhaps we should all take the same view of the same skp model and submit our best render at the highest quality and size. The model should be something with various finishes, including polished, matt, rough area. I have only one renderer (Shaderlight Pro), but I would like to see how it stacks up against the others. Specific hardware should be listed also.
1 Like
It isn’t a preview render, but also I didn’t do anything to improve the materials, that’s exactly the textures that SketchUp gave. It does use global illumination, so the lighting on the model is derived from the background image.
Rendering engines are definitiely a case of:
Powerful
Affordable
User-Friendly
“Pick any two”
But splitting them into categories helps. I would think about tags such as:
- Biased (quick) vs. Unbiased (physically-based realistic lighting model, eg if you need to generate realistic colour & lighting for interiors or architecture)
- Integrated in Sketchup (runs inside the app or has a very good interface) vs an “export” function
- Fast vs Slow (or CPU vs GPU - we’re talking here about whether it takes 1 hour or 5 mins per render)
- Real time vs not realtme
Specific features I would look for:
- A good material library (unless you create and manage your own high quality sketchup materials)
- Scattering (for grass and rocks etc)
- Proxies/dummies, so you can keep Sketchup’s geometry light but have some very detailed swappd
out components. - Animation or queing (even camera path/walkthrough is very useful)
- License manager (can hot-seat the license so you can model on 1 pc and render on another, or render in the cloud without punishing your modelling PC)
- Cross sections/cutaway digrams (renderer respects SKP section cuts)
- Lighting
- Fast glass (architectural glass/simple glass) reflections.
- Automatic detection of SKM materials such as metal, water and glass, and applying properties to those.
- Environment maps or climate (for cloudy skies etc)
If you design using Sketchup and then render and then tweak the design and then render again then you really want to minimise the amount of time spent In the renderer tweaking things. You can get carried away with materials options and placing ornaments in your scene, and then have to adjust it all over again when the design gets revised. I prefer that all the materials, scene lighting, ornaments etc are placed and adjusted inside SketchUp so that they can be edited and adjusted as part of the model.
Even though (near) photo-realism is easier to acheive these days, a lot of people now keep the rendering output basic (eg dont get into too many fancy materials or highly complex assets) but then use a stack of Photoshop effects and manual edits to give the output more of an artistic touch (can look amazing if done well). So the choice of renderer may also depend on your stylistic tendencies 
3 Likes
I have tried them all and I personal like www.brighter3d.com I use it for professional images for brochures. i know there is a mac version coming out very soon.
1 Like
it’s not claimed territory, it’s inventing the wheel again.
Don’t write (and format) somewhere and copy’npaste here but write to a post directly instead. For formattings a cheatsheet of the ‘Markdown’ lightweight markup language used by the forums software can be found e.g. here.
I use Unreal Engine for animation, environment, architecture and Keyshot for Product Design rendering,
My only advice: the rendering plugin you choose must be up to date. There are several that stopped development years ago, have no tutorials available (or they are too old) and one does not find other people offering advice on YouTube.
if you wanna go with the ‘industry standard’ rendering plugin check V-Ray ‘Next’ f. SketchUp… but not for 300 bucks, at least not fo the perpetual license 
Thank You!
I just starting to try it out. I’m wondering about buying direct, or though my local reseller. Not sure if they may offer more personalized support, if I need it.
a tech. support speaking your language and reachable by phone at you local time zone (Chaos Group = Bulgaria) as well as providing an invoice with a denoted VAT might be advantages.
Hi again All,
I do appreciate all the “positive” feedback from several Forum members on my effort to make a current list of SU Rendering programs available. In retrospect, it’s true that I didn’t do enough deep background research on what was already existing on the Forum - a lessen I have learned, and will keep!
However. the “negative” feedback from certain members has dissuaded me from any further effort. Evidently, I was just “recreating the wheel”, without adding any value … and perhaps stepping on the authority of other, older lists!
Since I was on a personal search, I thought I would share the process … but that was a bit naive.
In any case, thanks to all the resources and feedback available here, I think I have developed a fairly good list (but certainly still an imperfect work in progress, it still needs some sorting, and the many benefits of collaboration!) to use as a basis for decision making when shopping for a rendering solution on SketchUp.
I can make the latest version available (in a more user friendly format) if anyone is interested.
Thanks!
2 Likes
It’s worth sharing because you’re not alone in your search.
1 Like
Yes, agreed. I searched the forum for free rendering extensions, and most of the threads were filled mostly with lectures about searching the forum, too many similar threads, yada yada yada, and not much info about the actual topic.
My vote, just do what you want to do. Nobody is required to read anything.
1 Like
I still get a little tear in my eye when thinking about “Visualizer for SketchUp” by Imagination Technologies…
What a brilliant piece of software! I still have a 2015 version of Sketchup installed just to be able to use the last version of that render engine inside of Sketchup, as it even back then gave me a real-time lighting preview of my viewport. If you for some reason work with Sketchup 2013, 2014 or 2015 you can still use that last version 1.3 of Visualizer for SketchUp for FREE as they removed the cost of the license at the very end.
https://getvisualizer.com/
4 Likes
Thanks J.L,
Yes, I’ve heard a lot of good things about the old Visualizer … too bad someone can’t find a way to “uplift” that last version so that it could run on some of the more recent versions of SU …
Thing is, a lot of us don’t have SU 2015 sitting around that we can crank up … Is there even a way for any of us to get a copy of SU 2015 at this point?
Too bad!