Rendering Plugin

eccowboy

One question...are there any free rendering plugins for SU, that truly render a good quality??

Thanks,

Eccowboy

pilou

As you can export in OBJ in Pro or Free(by Tig) why not use Cycles of Blender ?
It's free !

solo

Pilou, I believe he asked for a plugin,not an export to 3rd party, however besides Kerkythea which technically is not a plugin but a studio based render solution with an export plugin there is no FREE render app within SU.

T_Osborn

As mentioned, Kerkythea probably comes closest. It's a standalone renderer with its own exporter which integrates seamlessly into Sketchup. Model in SU, run the Kerk exporter, and your model opens in Kerkythea ready for all of the materials, textures, and lighting setups to be made for rendering.

Note that SU groups and components as such do not export into Kerkythea. Instead, SU models/objects are identified in Kerk by the material names assigned in SU while modeling. As an example, if I am modeling a cabinet in SU, and apply a color from SU's color palette (e.g. "Color_000"--a shade of white), that cabinet is then identified in Kerkythea's outliner as "Color_000", not as "Cabinet" or "Entertainment Center" or whatever I might be calling that object. Other items in the scene, such as flooring, wall mouldings and etc. are in turn identified by their own SU material names.

You can apply all sorts or garish colors while in SU, if for no other reason than to help keep various objects distinctly different. You fix all that while choosing the final material properties once in Kerkythea--color, specularity, texture, and so on.

Kerkythea is capable of producing excellent renders approaching photorealism. However, the learning curve is very steep if you've no prior rendering software experience. Documentation is poor for Kerkythea, so you sort of start trying things to see how they work; but given the multitude of possible settings, things can get out of hand right quick.

Kerkythea renders can take a while depending upon the complexity of your scene as the rendering is entirely in CPU. Some renderers (Octane, Blender 3D's Cycles renderer, LuxRender) do all or part of the rendering in the GPU, with much reduced render times. Octane is not free; Blender and LuxRender are. Blender's Cycles render engine only functions with nVidia GPUs (GTX 5** series being the best performers). The Blender internal renderer (not Cycles) runs entirely in CPU and so is GPU agnostic. Cycles is interactive, meaning that you can alter materials and other settings in real-time during the render, unlike in Kerkythea. Blender gives you the option of two internal renderers--the original Blender Internal, and the newer Cycles if you have a compatible GPU.

To use Blender for rendering, you'll need to install TIG's OBJ-exporter plugin (free) into Sketchup--this is assuming you are using the free version of SU. You then save your SU model in OBJ format, which can then be opened in Blender. Be aware that no SU component or group associations or material assignments are seen by Blender in the OBJ file--it's just a huge pile of "meshes". If you have modeled a scene with multiple objects, you'll have a tough time selecting them individually for materials editing. In that case, you might be best served saving each scene object individually in SU as an OBJ file, opening them singly in Blender, and then welding or joining each object's meshes into one unified object (e.g. a vase, lamp table, wine glass). Then you can combine these different objects within a new Blender scene and set about the materials and lighting setups.

As with Kerkythea, Blender has a huge and difficult learning curve. But Blender is also a serious and complex modeling software, and it is free. You can choose to focus just on the rendering features. You would have to get familiar with the basic object manipulations to move things around, set up lighting, modify scenes and such. Modeling, at least certain kinds of modeling (non-organic?) is far easier in SU. I am continually amazed at how good a job the SU developers did at making SU intuitive and easy to learn. I'm basically the village idiot, yet I was successfully modeling in just a few hours. Wish Blender was that way. There are a ton of Blender tutorials at youtube and elsewhere--just have to find ones that start at your level.

LuxRender is ahybrid renderer, splitting the rendering calculations between both CPU and GPU to leverage both. Lux can utilize either AMD or nVidia GPUs within certain model ranges, so you aren't locked into a specific vendor. Unfortunately, the LuxRender Sketchup plugin is not yet ready. There is one for Blender, however, so I suppose one could export a Sketchup model as an OBJ file, open it in Blender, then export from there into LuxRender. I haven't yet tried that workaround as I don't have a suitable GPU for LuxRender.

There might be other options, but these were what came to mind immediately. The renderer landscape is continually changing, but most are licensed softwares with steep prices.

mitcorb

To T_Osborn:
Thank you for taking the time to write this very clear assessment of the use of Kerkythea with Sketchup, and the additional information you provided in your response for the other applications. Somebody somewhere may have already said these things, but I don't think quite as eloquently as you have.

pilou

When you have components in SU , export in Collada format, you will have each components in Blender as different object "empty"

Loose geometry to groups by Chris Fullmer
So make only components in SU so transform your groups in Components by Thomthom
and this for the rest

code by Tig put this in the ruby console in one line!

m=Sketchup.active_model;
m.start_operation("Faces>Compos");
n=m.active_entities;m.selection.to_a.each{|e|(g=n.add_group(e.all_connected);
g.to_component.definition.name="FaceSet#1")if e.valid? and e.parent==n.parent and e.class==Sketchup;;Face};
m.commit_operation

T_Osborn

I managed to forget about Maxwell Render. There is a free version for Sketchup--it operates as a direct plugin which incorporates the renderer right into SU. The free version of Maxwell is limited to a render resolution of 800x800, and there are some other limitations as compared to the full, licensed Maxwell.