Rendering Software and Plugins
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Indigo 4 does GPU (OpenCL) rendering as well as CPU rendering. The same licence gives you access (obviously different plugins) from SketchUp, Blender, Revit, Cinema 4D, 3DS Max, Maya and iClone. Take a look...
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Easiest way to chose is to trial each.
I see stunning results from all you listed. It's typically not the engine that makes great renders but the user.
I've used 3 from your list, Thea, Vray and Podium, and they all do great renders.
I found Thea to be best integrated into SketchUp. But the recent Vray Beta looks very slick.
Horses for courses as they say.
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Twilight Render Pro has an "almost" real time render window, but the biggest benefit is applying material template presets to SKUP materials. You can also use it with the free Kerkythea renderer to create a render farm.
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I am a long time su podium user.
I cannot comment on other applications, but I will say that the thing that decided it for me years ago was the su podium approach of balancing high quality renders with a interface and learning curve that is manageable for those of us that cannot look away from the bottom line in order to create impactfull renders.
Don't get me wrong, one has to put in some time to get the hang of it, but the learning curve is short to be producing some very nice renders and with some extra effort one can produce stunning images.
Below are a few examples of real world projects for pay done by me. I am by no means a master and to truly see what supodium can do you should check out their gallery where the masters exibit their work.
This is more an example of what one can produce without breaking a sweat and staying on budget.
paul
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Very nice Paul. Any post processing applied to these renders?
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Very little.
I usually just adjust the levels a bit to increase depth of shadows and on exteriors I might straighten the verticals a tad.I do that in PS, but supodium now has a built in tweaker that i think does both those and more.
I have never used the built in editor, just because i have always done it with PS and I am an old dog.p
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Have been very happy with ShaderLight...pretty inexpensive, has it's own library of light fixtures with imbedded IES data...very happy with minimal upfront investment of time and cost.
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@blackdogsketch said:
Have been very happy with ShaderLight...pretty inexpensive, has it's own library of light fixtures with imbedded IES data...very happy with minimal upfront investment of time and cost.
Hi
at the time I prefer a combination of 2 simple "click and render" tools:
For exteriors I also use ShaderLight and prefer this tool because of its good HDR lighting capabilities. For interiors instead I use Render[In] because of it's incredibly simple to create artificial light setups.
(two RI examples I have linked below)
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=81%26amp;t=65985
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=333%26amp;t=66779 -
Render[in] has a new version yesterday!
https://renderin.com/ -
@pilou said:
Render[in] has a new version yesterday!
https://renderin.com/I would like to know more about their virtual tour capabilities. Their website only shows one example and it only has one scene. Several button on the scene but none of them seem to work.
I also did not see any tutorials or otherwise information about how to use the product.
Can you point to any? The quality of their renders certainly looks great but would like to know more detailed information about the product. Perhaps some of you who use it can enlighten the rest of us.
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@ntxdave said:
...I would like to know more about...
Hi Dave, if you are interested, on the Render[In] forum I wrote an quite extensive review about this tool. You'll recognize my comment there on my coyote logo and it´s length
https://forums.abvent.com/viewtopic.php?f=84%26amp;t=1338
(BTW, Render[In] is the very "little sister" of ArtLantis Render)@pilou said:
Render[in] has a new version yesterday!
Hi Polou, I asked there and it is only the adjustment to the current SU version, but no new or other functions otherwise
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@hornoxx said:
Hi Dave, if you are interested, on the Render[In] forum I wrote an quite extensive review about this tool. You'll recognize my comment there on my coyote logo and it´s length
https://forums.abvent.com/viewtopic.php?f=84%26amp;t=1338
(BTW, Render[In] is the very "little sister" of ArtLantis Render)Interesting review but it did not tell me much about the virtual tour capability unless what you are saying is that it uses SketchUp scenes and turns each of them into a panorama. I am probably not understanding this correctly. As you have probably seen in other threads on this forum, I do car washes. I want to be able to walk the viewer through all aspects of the car was. Right now the 2 best tools I have found for that are CL3VER and Sketchfab.
I really wish some of these other products could take advantage of Fredo's Animator plugin and allow me to include that as well.
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Spent two weeks with Octane over the holidays. Could never get it to work properly with the SU plug-in. Even they admitted as much and refunded my purchase. They are now working on a new and total rewrite. For what it's worth, Octane standalone is truly stunning and created both biased and unbiased "photographs." I so wanted it to work.
Check out my YouTube videos on SketchUp to Unity, you might find it to be a good and free solution. Also, Octane has announced they will be releasing a plug-in for Unity sometime this quarter.
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I went through the mill of testing all the renderers a year ago and settled on Thea. The other option was V-ray. It was a close call, but Thea won out and I'm pretty happy with it and it's very very close integration to SketchUp. The only problem is the huge following of v-ray, there is a huge community of people using it. A bit like the AutoCAD of renderers. Getting hold of materials for v-ray is a lot easier than Thea.
The GPU rendering in Thea is so fast and integrated that I don't think it can be beaten, in fact you can stick any old GPUs in the machine and it'll take advantage of them. It also has built in support for Skalp which features very heavily in my workflow.
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I'm familiar with Thea, I actually own a copy. I have not tried it since I now have compatible GPUs installed on my machine.
Unity provides animation capabilities that neither Thea nor Octane can currently create in reasonable amount of time. And just in as important for my needs, you can output to a VR headset.
I'll be sure and check out Thea soon. Thx!
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