Evaluating Rendering Products

[Al Hart]

I agree, it must be hard to judge rendering products by looking at the Gallery images. We used to have a designer using our 256-color rendering product for ARRIS CAD, 15 years ago, who could make just great renderings. His secret was to use lights and materials very carefully, and it usually took him 3 to 5 days to create the model and get a great Rendering. Also, he had a great "eye" for what made a good rendering. (Russell H. I hope you recognize yourself if you are reading this.)

We are currently implementing a new rendering engine, Nxt, created by the original developer of AccuRender. (See: http://nxt.accurender.com) Nxt does much better things with reflected light, reflections, HDRI skies, etc. And it will be a user option to select IRender or Nxt as the renderer (light, material settings, etc. will work with either renderer.)

We are working on a similar interface to Kerkythea which will use the IRender lights, SketchUp lights, light fixtures, material wizards, mirrors, Render Ready Components, etc. and export them for use with Kerkythea. We're not sure people will purchase IRender just as a front end for Kerkythea, but as we put more and more effort into making it easier to define your rendering in SketchUp, it might be worth it to have a product which lets you choose multiple renderers.

Since Kerkythea is free, this is an relatively easy project and will probably make it easier for people who prefer Kerkythea to create SketchUp models which work with it. (If any other renderer suppliers are interested in taking advantage of our SketchUp interfaces, let us know.)

I will be interested in your thoughts and those of other SketchUp users.

@chippwalters said:

Stinkie,

A very interesting subject. Judging a renderer by the quality of it's users renders. I, too, agree with what you say-- for the most part. But, I do find it interesting Biebel and maybe 1 or 2 others have really been able to push Podium to the photoreal level. I wonder how much of it is Podium and how much of it is the artist (I have my own ideas;-)

So, the thought becomes, how does a rendering package, like IRender, woo the render geniuses, aka Biebel, into their OWN fold. I would imagine Biebel, with his sensibilities, could create much better with IRender than what is currently in their gallery. Though, who knows.

The real fact is, many of us use vendors galleries as a measuring stick, and make purchase decisions based on what can be done. IMO, this is the reason for the success of packages like Podium and e-on's Vue as well. Just a single look at 'the best of the best' tells serious users what a package is capable of.

[Pixero]

I went to the nxt site and took a look at those examples. But the rendertimes???
Original size 1024x768 took 8 hours to render!!! And quality was nothing spectacular.
Thats extremly slow in my opinion.
I use Vray for SketchUp and like the easyness while still having depth to customize settings. All well intergrated inside SketchUp.

To succeed I belive you should go for: Quality (obvious), speed, integration, simple to use presets, "In depth tweek-ability" (for the advanced users) and a open architecture for 3rd party developers of shaders and more.
What I really would want to see is someone porting MentalRay to function inside SketchUp.

[tbd]

Al: how about developing an open specification that any render can use ?
a set of data that can be attached to attributes and a render can read and process

[Fletch]

Hi Al,

so... basically, you are talking about writing a second 'SU2KT (SketchUp2Kerkythea)' exporter?
... sorry... I'm confused.

Have you thought about writing a universal exporter if you want to take on something like this... that will export to Kerkythea, Indigo, RenderMan, Sunflow, and all the other great free render engines... heck let's just throw in Maxwell and Vray just for fun.

[ilay7k]

hello Al ...
I first had to render with RAYTRACE 1.0.I29 version (found on the disk / old forum ehhh ...)... IRender is now.
Tool(AccuRender) was in old autocad but AutoDesk devs dragged mental-ray into ACAD 2007-2009(beta)...

Al, will always competitors!
need to develop plug with new GI algorithm or ... inject(hack) some functions into skipy to render and support high-poly structures

@unknownuser said:

that will export to Kerkythea, Indigo, RenderMan, Sunflow, and all the other great free render engines... heck let's just throw in Maxwell and Vray just for fun.

Well, 3dSMAX-users have such convertor FinalRender-M~R-Fry-Metray...why not in skp-ruby?

[a4chitect]

i am a passionate kerkythea user (the renderer of choice for more then 2 years) and i guess that with the upcoming release it's gonna gain momentum, but from the perspective of su integration the sk-indigo interface is a little ahead and propably the best. I hope that tomasz (su2kt) is in contact with its author and the next su2kt is a piece of art. Damn this sketchup has maybe more people coding than many open source apps.

[dtrarch]

Al

I checked out the Accurender site and in truth was underwhelmed by the render quality.
Also only saw one interior with lighting and same did not project light on anything. ???

Dry hole IMO.

dtr

[Al Hart]

@unknownuser said:

Al: how about developing an open specification that any render can use ?
a set of data that can be attached to attributes and a render can read and process

That is the idea TBD. We will develop a set of Ruby routines to convert IRender components, settings, etc. to SU2K formats, and then make them available to you so you (and others) can use it to convert them to Podium, (or other renderer) formats.

You can either user the conversion routines to convert IRender data to other formats, or use them as part of your export to read IRender data directly.

We hope to get our $$ from users who will be willing to purchase IRender for its wizards to create lights, materials, and other rendering settings.

[Al Hart]

@fletch said:

Hi Al,

so... basically, you are talking about writing a second 'SU2KT (SketchUp2Kerkythea)' exporter?
... sorry... I'm confused.

Have you thought about writing a universal exporter if you want to take on something like this... that will export to Kerkythea, Indigo, RenderMan, Sunflow, and all the other great free render engines... heck let's just throw in Maxwell and Vray just for fun.

No - we do not plan to write a SU2K second converter. We plan to write a routine which converts IRender light, reflection, refraction, and other settings to the format expected by the SU2KT exporter. (And to work with Kerkythea to add items which may not be in the current exporter - such as "index of refraction", etc.)

This won't be a universal exporter, but rather a piece of software which other exporter writers can use to convert IRender objects to the format they expect. (And, of course, we would be available to help the other exporter writers.)

[Al Hart]

@dtrarch said:

Al

I checked out the Accurender site and in truth was underwhelmed by the render quality.
Also only saw one interior with lighting and same did not project light on anything. ???

Dry hole IMO.

dtr

Nxt is in Beta test mode and a few, good, AccuRender users have been helping with it.

One of its goals is to provide a "Studio" mode, in which you can render an object without adding any lights, but still ge a good rendering. (This is used by adding HDRI illumination and reflection). By eliminating the step of adding lights, it makes it easy to get a good rendering without spending time adding things to your drawing.

If I understand it correctly, this rendering was made without adding lighting to the model, but just by selecting the Studio setting. (Ignore the fact that the race car is wheel are below the floor - this is just a beta test image.)

It is great to have reflective materials, etc. but they need something to reflect. The Studio mode gives objects something to reflect without having to add a lot of geometry to the model.