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 Podium is free and
Light Up 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 within 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 800×800 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.

IDX Renditioner is my favorite, it's quick and simple to use.