MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
As above. Are there any free renderers that work with Google's sketch up?
I know there are renderers for the Pro version but its a small personal project so I can't justify the expense.
Alternatively will a free or trial version of a renderer work with the trial of Sketch up Pro?
You after decent photo-realistic rendering? IIRC [url= http://www.suplugins.com/ ]Podium[/url] is free and [url= http://www.light-up.co.uk/ ]
Light Up[/url] has a free trial period. I prefer LightUp - easier control of emitters & suchlike.
I'm interested in this too. I was considering taking it out to Blender which I have some experience with, but to be honest, something [b]within[/b] sketchup sounds much better. I'm going to take a closer look at that Podium app - some of the gallery images look spot-on.
There's a list of others here:
http://sketchup.google.com/download/plugins.html
I use podium daily it is very simple and you can create nice renders in under 2 mins, I would say that the images on podium's website have been post edited in photoshop.
Does lightup work inside SKP? I might give it a whirl.
JON you are aware you can export images from sketchup with shadows etc which are of a presentable standard.
Yep LightUp is embeddded within SketchUp - it's probably a little more fiddly than Podium but when I started looking at renderers I tried both in comparison and achieved better results faster using LightUp, so stuck with it.
cool I'll give it a go then. what do you use SKP for?
AFAICT all these are $150+ with time-limited trials available.
However browsing through them I noticed that http://www.indigorenderer.com/sketchup/ was free forever for non-commercial work with a 0.7 megapixel output limit (approx 800x800 pixels). So I think I might give that one a go.
All great info guys. Thanks. I've had a quick play with the podium and does seem user friendly. However, it has caused my model to fail a couple of time so far.
I'll try the indigo next.
Just had a quick blast on light up I like the idea of that IES stuff. You have any tips or tricks I'm reading the manual.
[url= http://www.idx-design.com/IDX/IDXRenditioner/tabid/709/Default.aspx ]IDX Renditioner[/url] is my favorite, it's quick and simple to use.