Podium VS IDX Renditioner VS Twilight. Which To Buy?

Align · 26 Oct 2009, 15:12

hi. im thinking about buying a sketchup renderer. but all the other renderers are completely unfriendly price wise to noobs. but the freeones are just to hard to use. i guess free comes with a price. plus i want a built in renderer. whats the best renderer out of the three for a total sketchup beginner?

remus · 26 Oct 2009, 15:30

personally id go with twilight. Lots of options to play with as your skills advance but also very quick to setup for an inexperienced user.

pilou · 26 Oct 2009, 15:31

The more easy for a total sketchup beginner with any doubt is Podium (Only 2 sliders)!!!

The more easy access for a complex render use is TwilightRender
The more funny for "Real Time" is Light Up
I don't know IDX

PS You have also Kerkythea (who is the big brother of TwilightRender) who is "free"
But maybe not so easy than its little brother

solo · 26 Oct 2009, 15:52

There are trials and demo's for all these render solutions, try before you buy.
Pick the one you enjoy, remember the render engine is only 50% your enjoyment and skill is the other 50%

Ecuadorian · 26 Oct 2009, 17:25

Hi, and welcome to the SCF.

Could you please tell us what your intended use would be?
Hobby or commercial use?
If it's for commercial use, how tight are your deadlines?
Still images or videos?
Static videos or videos with animated objects?
What size, in meters or feet, are your projects, usually?
How complex are those projects?
Will most of your renders be exteriors or interiors?
In the case you need only stills, are they only for showing on screens or for printing?
Do you prefer a more hand-drawn style, or a more photo-real one?
How much do you already know about rendering?
If you're completely new to this field, how much do you enjoy learning?
Have you already used up all that can be done within SketchUp?
Do you usually apply lots of carefully chosen textures to your models?

notareal · 26 Oct 2009, 17:35

@solo said:

There are trials and demo's for all these render solutions, try before you buy.
Pick the one you enjoy, remember the render engine is only 50% your enjoyment and skill is the other 50%

+1

There are not that meny build in renderers for SU. So you can try those quite quickly. Also, I would take a look on the forums of those products. Personally, I would start from Twilight

Align · 26 Oct 2009, 18:12

@ecuadorian said:

Hi, and welcome to the SCF.

Could you please tell us what your intended use would be? architectural design. for now anyway. vehicles seem to hard.
Hobby or commercial use? hobby.
If it's for commercial use, how tight are your deadlines? just for fun.
Still images or videos? still images. i don't think i have the patience to do animation.
Static videos or videos with animated objects? no animation.
What size, in meters or feet, are your projects, usually? lol i have no idea. im a total beginner.
How complex are those projects? i hope to design, bigger buildings. like mansions, industrial/commercial buildings, sky scrapers, ect. ect. for now though ill focus on smaller buildings like residential houses, small offices/buildings ect. ect.
Will most of your renders be exteriors or interiors? exteriors. as i improve, ill try to add interiors.
In the case you need only stills, are they only for showing on screens or for printing? just for sharing my work with the sketchup community/3dwarehouse.
Do you prefer a more hand-drawn style, or a more photo-real one? photo realistic.
How much do you already know about rendering? as much as i know about calculus. nothing.
If you're completely new to this field, how much do you enjoy learning? learning's fine if its not going to be a total brain buster.
Have you already used up all that can be done within SketchUp? no way! i just installed sketchup yesterday after googling 'easy 3d modeling'
Do you usually apply lots of carefully chosen textures to your models? probably not. at least not now anyway.

excellent post.

JGA · 26 Oct 2009, 20:02

Align,
Take heed of the sensible advise from Pilou & Solo.
The software gets you so far, but there is still a "black art" in getting the output to match the examples from the other repliers.
Podium can give very good results, as can Twilight which has the advantage of different rendering methods which gives a bit more control over the output result/render time balancing act; & a built in template system which reduces the grief of setting up realistic materials.
I can't vouch one way or another for IDX.

richcat · 26 Oct 2009, 22:12

As solo says
"There are trials and demo's for all these render solutions, try before you buy.
Pick the one you enjoy, remember the render engine is only 50% your enjoyment and skill is the other 50%"

Heres a link as no ones provided it for nXtRender free 30 day trial (if you like it $79 student $35) which is the smaller brother of the IRender nXt.

sepo · 27 Oct 2009, 10:26

I really tend not to get involved with these treads nowdays as they end up advertising by proxy. I would suggest you download trial of each and give them a whirl. Go and check forums of individual renderers and see which one will give you best help while learning. I think if you are beginer that would be your best course of action.

Ecuadorian · 5 Nov 2009, 17:46

Thanks for the info!
Ok, based on your replies, my recommendation is:

Before entering the rendering world, learn as much of SketchUp as you can. My first stop would be the official videos:
http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos.html
Start with the "New to Google SketchUp" ones. Back in January, I watched them all (the new to sketchup ones) and made all the exercises in one or two days. Before this, I had tried to learn SketchUp by myself several times but found it puzzling. Take a weekend off for this if needed. Pay special attention to the lesson on how to work with materials. Watching these videos will help you avoid making tons of mistakes in the future. Also, having learned to model properly in SketchUp will be a great help when you start rendering. Trying to learn both at the same time is the perfect recipe for frustration.
Learn all you can about image manipulation. If you don't already have an image editor like Photoshop, download the free GIMP. Whatever you use, learn to use it for creating and editing seamless textures for your SketchUp models, and also try making some basic photomontages with your models. By trial and error, try to fully absorb concepts such as pixels, megapixels and dpi, learn to choose colors via RGB and HSB, and more, to apply some filters and effects, and to manipulate color levels and color curves. This knowledge will prove priceless in the next step.

Before the next step, try learning some general stuff about rendering. Start by watching the "making of" documentaries in Pixar DVDs or in Shrek's DVD.

Once you have some SketchUp and Image manipulation experience under your belt (should take a month) and since you say you have no deadlines and you're ding this as a hobby, I would recommend to start playing with all program demos you can until you find the one that "clicks".

[Edited to remove all references to specific renderers]

drfabinex · 8 Dec 2009, 13:14

I've tried all three (limited use with podium admittedly) and my opinion is that IDX is a fantastic renderer if you need quick relatively high quality renders. It has many light options, and makes it very easy to create custom light fixtures and customize materials directly within Sketchup. What I found is that straight out of the box I could make clean crisp interior renderings with 15 minute render times. See below.

That said, if you're looking at getting better at rendering over time, doing animations, or don't have tight deadlines, then Twilight renderer is your choice for integrated rendering. With a little more tweaking and a little more time I'm confident you could produce some top quality images AND animations. Last I checked it was half the price of IDX and Podium too. Twilight has A LOT of options and an easy interface.

My company went with IDX for the speed and quality and I'm quite satisfied.

Gaieus · 8 Dec 2009, 13:42

IDX is indeed very fast and can be easily set up - however there is one thing I am missing in it; the lack of alpha transparency support. A 2D Face me plant would look like this when rendered:

Instead of something like this:

Hopefully it will be fixed soon as William Manning, developer (and a good fellow member here), said this is something they are working on. For interior design, this is of course not that big of a deal anyway - it's rather a flaw for exteriors and landscape designers.

As I have just checked, there is a discount on IDX at the moment and it is below $100 now, too.
http://www.idx-design.com/IDX/IDXRenditioner/tabid/709/Default.aspx

Elibjr · 8 Dec 2009, 17:44

I agree with Richat and I, too, like nXtRender which has an interface that is similar to Podium as it is very simple to use and you can have a very large rendersize... the great thing here is that if you upgrade to the more powerful IRender nXt you won't have to do anything to the existing models. All the parameters you set up in nXt Render will transfer over to the new software because they are saved with the model. And they both use the same rendering engine.

The thing to note here is no matter which one you choose, realise that the renderer uses the power of your CPU and NOT the graphics card. So a dual core (sometimes called threads) CPU will not render as quickly as one that has 4. But, this is only applicable if the software (the rendering software, that is) is multi-core friendly.

In most cases you can try most of these out for 30 days and find out which one works for you.

honoluludesktop · 8 Dec 2009, 18:55

Gai, That's not really fair is it? I could be wrong, but my recollection is that as far as alpha support, IDX renders everything that SU can display. Will SU display your example of a 2d face-me tree? Still, having alpha support beyond SU can be a asset at times. Anyway, my apologies if I am mistaken.

Not a good example of a render (I did this with IDX out of the box), but note the 2d face-me trees.

"Black Art" indeed:-)

Gaieus · 8 Dec 2009, 19:34

Hm. Then what am I doing wrong?
Are your trees really cut out in SU (like outlines traced and such)?

honoluludesktop · 8 Dec 2009, 19:55

Here is a (too long) post I wrote about making 2d images, and another 2d person I did for fun:-)

honoluludesktop · 8 Dec 2009, 19:57

Those trees I downloaded from Google, attached is a IDX render with 2d face-me people that I cut out in SU.

wmanning · 8 Dec 2009, 20:20

Actually Gaieus is right: IDX Renditioner doesn't support a true alpha transparency .png material. You've just found a work-around that's good for you.

Unfortunately our development team had been sidelined on some other projects, DoubleCAD in particular, otherwise we'd have had a version out with Alpha transparency a long time ago.

It's coming, along with other bells and whistles, but I don't have a firm date yet.

And you're right: we do have a half off special on the web site for the month of December. Thanks for mentioning it.

-- William

Gaieus · 8 Dec 2009, 21:59

Hi William

Really looking forward to that new version! Hope you1ll be able to release it soon - although DoubleCAD has also proved very useful (both for me and many others) so I could now not really decide which development to support.