Twilight Render for Sketchup

[CNYDWW]

Hey guys,

You all know by now i do a lot with sketchup and even use it exclusively at work for design. The big boss wants better rendering so i've been looking into plugins for sketchup. So far i think we're going to go with Twilight. For $100 it's worth a look. I've attached a before and after pic.

Regards

[WoodMarvels.com]

That's quite a massive difference - always wondered why Sketchup doesn't use the same opensource render engine as Blender(.org).

Jon

[CNYDWW]

Well, Jon, considering it's history with Google and now passed on to Trimble we may yet see it. On the other hand, we may see sketchup turn into another big buy like solidworks.

As it is the rendering above was on the first viable standard resolution setting which only took three min. to render.

Regards

[WoodMarvels.com]

3 minutes is awesome rendering time... I'm happy if it's under half an hour and I have an i7 3930K processor in my main workstation! I think Sketchup is a great program - if I had that 20 years back along with Blender I'd be using them a lot - I got use to 3DS Max for my stuff as that's what I taught myself.

You should see the awesome stuff Bill Young does with Sketchup!

Jon

[adrianm]

I use the Persistence of Vision Raytrace (POV) plugin. It's free as is POV itself and it's very powerful.

It also has the added advantage that Aspire 4 outputs POV files as well so you can use the same package in both programs which reduces the learning curve.

[makeCNC]

you can get Vray for sketchup this will deliver awesome photo realistic results.
I am not sure what they are charging for it now days though .
I have done a ton of work with sketchup in the past and the only problem with the software is it does not do true ARCS just many line segments to produce curves and circles which is very unfreindly for G-code..and CNC so everything I have done in sketchup I had to bring into Vectric software and do post work on to clean up the DXF for final use....so I moved on to AutoCAD and inventor as its my full time job these days so the expense was justified but sketchup is still a great program to quickly build up a house design or pattern idea .

[makeCNC]

Here is a quick pic of a Vray render of the Fairy Tale Villa

http://www.makecnc.com/images/misc/Fairy_tale_dollhouse_3d_puzzle_toy_500.jpg

[CNYDWW]

Thanks for bringing this thread back. I usually create any of my curved profiles in Draftsight then import them. When exported as a dwg again from sketchup, the radius and center point are exported as they were imported. It helps greatly.

Regards
Randy