@notareal said:

If I recall right 3DS Release 4 had a scan line renderer. So pretty much all "modern" renderers do use much advanced technologies (and also material systems) and naturally results are quite different, even with low quality settings. So... using default settings, new renderers are probably slower, but if you are willing to play and test, then I think most biased renderes should be able to give fast enough results, if you happy with quality like in those reference images.
If looking those reference images, I am pretty sure that Thea can render a interior like that (720p) about in a minute (with biased core). Thea can also save image sequences as TGA. http://www.thearender.com Not to forget that Thea can produce very high quality results too if needed, but render times will increase.
Naturally "game engine" based renderers can be even faster (Lumion etc.).
Thanks, notareal. The render times sound encouraging, with room to raise parameters for better results. Sheesh! I have a lot to learn re: new terminology. I've been out of the loop too long. Biased? Unbiased?
Oh, well, your recommended program seems to support both, so that can't be bad. One question. In addition to 3D modelling/animating, I also play keyboards in a prog-rock band (Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, etc.) and am looking at a cool device called "ControlBLADE", by Music Computing. It is an i7-based computer with a built-in piano keyboard, designed to run software synthesizers and samples for composing, recording and live performing. It has 16 gig RAM, 1 TB SATA drive, but only has system board graphics (dual monitor support at HD 1080p). I assume this program, like Sketchup can only benefit from a heavy-duty graphics card (nVidia?)? Also, this system is 64-bit. Do either of these programs benefit from that?

@jason_maranto said:

You can easily get that quality level from several "real-time" render engines (I'm partial to http://lumion3d.com/ for this type of work) -- however most of them use GPU processing so if you don't have a recent/powerful video card you would need to purchase that in addition to the program.

Alternately you might look at http://www.artlantis.com/ or http://www.light-up.co.uk/ which can also hit that target very quickly and have different relative strengths.

Best,
Jason.
Thanks, Jason. I know I can get the quality needed, but my concern is that render time for an animation TGA sequence of frames is prohibitive. I need to produce TGA sequence for post-production studios. I am looking for a renderer that can output animation sequences with the minimum quality shown above at a rate of about 5-6 minutes per frame at HD 720p(?).

@thomthom said:

Think we need to see some reference imagery of what kind of results you are expecting.
Thanks for reply. The top image is the quality needed for rendered still to be printed. The middle and bottom images represent the minimum quality needed for animations.

Hi, all...

I've been following threads here that discuss render plug-in options for Sketchup and there appears to be a sizable selection. They all seem to be fairly equal with some consideration as to strength and weakness. I have soldiered on as a 3D modeler/animator for many years, using old 3DS Release 4 for DOS. I've come to like how fast and simple it is. Time has come to move on as the old DOS towers have died. They served me well.

What really puzzles me when looking at the options to render within and without Sketchup is the astronomical rendering times! My old system could render fairly complex scenes with shadows and reflections aplenty at about 3 to 5 minutes each frame (animation TGA sequence at NTSC res.). It seems this new generation stuff is MUCH slower, despite far more sophisticated technology! Sure, scene generation is much more sophisticated and light calculation far more accurate, but it seems the machines can't keep up with demand. How is it practical to do animation sequences with frames coming out at 20 to 30 minutes each???

Can any of the dozens of render options out there produce render times even approaching what I was able to do in 3DSR4? Do you find yourselves having to resort to render farms?

@adamb said:

LightUp (http://light-up.co.uk) will render TGA sequences from your SketchUp Scene animations.
Thanks! I'll check into it...

Can anyone recommend a good high-quality renderer that can render TGA sequences in addition to animation files? I'd like to keep the expenditure under $500.00.

TIA!

@idahoj said:

Dell Vostro 3500 series: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/vostro-3500/fs

Great bang for the buck. Bought one after my Sony VAIO crapped out after only 2 years use ...

As far as the debate concerning Radeon chipsets ... Since AMD bought ATi and started branding under the AMD label, the driver quality has gotten much, much better. I run Radeon cards in my desktops without any appreciable issues.

Cheers.

Thanks, Idaho. While this does look good indeed, I am hoping to find one who's scanline resolution can match my old Dell M60. It is 1080, while I see this one is 768. Given that the card sports 4 times the on-board ram, I'm a bit surprised that they don't have a unit sporting 1080 scanlines.

@fletch said:

Why would Radeon not work with SU?

I've built and rendered massive projects on an old Dell Lattitude D620 with its TERRIBLE graphics card even in SU7 before it handled big scenes well.

http://us.toshiba.com/computers/laptops/satellite/A660/A665-S6094 (corei7 laptop for around $1000)

I have heard great things about Sony VAIO.

Thanks for link. It looks like a lot of computer for the money, but it seems to only support 720p (I currently have 1080p on my old Dell M60)
Re: Radeon, it just seems to be the consensus in the forum over the years that Radeon is problematic and Nvidia is the choice. I went with that. Interesting that it has served you well. Wonder what the forum is saying about it now?

@2kemon said:

...you could take a look at the sony vaio e-series. It got me drooling a bit

But maybe that's just because I'm limited to a budget I can actually save up for before I retire as an old man!
If you customize it on the sony page you could end up with around a 1100 USD configuration that would probably fly well with sketchup and other graphical resource hogs

There's a review that seems to be legit right here:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Sony-Vaio-VPC-EB1S1E-BJ-Notebook.27201.0.html

Thanks for that, 2kemon, but it seems that the Sony comes with Radeon graphics. I hear that the card of choice for SU users is Nvidia. Can the Sony be ordered with that?

@ledisnomad said:

I'm no expert, but I try to keep up on exactly what you're looking for: bang-for-the-buck hardware. My office just bought a new laptop for presentations, but it needed to be robust enough to support real-time fly-through and design charrettes. We got an Alienware laptop from Dell. Although the Alienware is great, the 15" uncustomized model is $1200, perhaps a little more than your budget. However, the uncustomized Dell XPS 17" with similar power, maybe even a little more, is listed as $949. The only thing I'd upgrade on that is from Windows 7 Home to Pro for $130, so $1079, just over your budget.

Thanks for reply. It seems Alienware is a stand-alone brand, not attached to Dell(?).

I'll look into the XPS 17.

Thanks again!

Hello, all...

I've been a Sketchup Pro user for about 8 years now and have been satisfied with my Dell M60 laptop, which has performed flawlessly for 7 of those years (which I purchased on the recommendation of SU users on the original forum back in the @last days/pre-Google days). I see that there are several threads about which laptop is best to have for SU. My old Dell, trusty as she has been, won't last forever and I need to look into a new laptop. The discussions seem to be all about max performance, price be damned. Unfortunately, my budget is around a grand or so. Keeping bang-for-buck in mind, any advice?

TIA!

Garry

@ecuadorian said:

Why not do it in Podium? Someone made a Plug-in for it so it can make animations.

Unfortunately, it treats scenes as individual frames, rather than keyframes (or am I wrong about that?). It requires you to create a path that gets broken up into the # of scenes you need. In creating a walk-through the camera and it's target follow the path created, resulting in "straight ahead" camera views, resulting in a boring, robotic tour. While you can change target from scene to scene, it is very impractical.

......or did I miss something?

@sjaak said:

Try Artlantis.

301 Moved Permanently

(www.artlantis.com)

Sjaak

I checked out their site. Wow! The prices have really gone up!
I purchased Artlantis 4 years ago (495.00)and liked it, but there were too many glitches when using Sketchup. When i re-introduced a changed model, it would not aquire the materials from the existing atl file and when they could not help me, I got my money back.

I still like it the best of what I've tried and assume that integration has become seemless by now. I see they talk of a plug-in version for Sketch-up, but could only find a download for a file converter. Is that what they meant? Is there a plug-in version of Artlantis that is cheaper than the full stand-alone?

@earthmover said:

I tried Shade and didn't like it at all. Can't say why, just didn't really jive with me.

If you guys just want to do camera path animation, I find Vue great for exterior stuff. If it were for interior animation, I would stay away from vue as the settings needed to get good interior lighting are taxing on render times. Modo would be a great option for the money and give you both rendering, modeling and animation tools.

Personally I prefer using my older version of Max for animation stuff. The toolset has been extremely robust since at least Max 5. If you can find an older (cheaper) copy, that would be my first choice. Lightwave is also pretty robust for less than a grand.

Thanks Earthmover. I actually did like Shade from trying the demo version. All the tools I came to know in 3DS and only 200.00. Alas, there seems to be no reliable integration between it and Sketchup. I do have a licensed seat of Max 2.0, but never came to like it and soldiered on with my old DOS farm running 3DSr4 ver. 4.0 (circa 1994). I now run it on my laptop, using Virtual PC DOS window, but it is a kluge. I guess i should not have let Max intimidate me. Now I am in a bit of a bind, as my old system is dying and my time and finances stretched. I'm getting the impression that one just chooses to go with a package and learn it and it will probably be just fine.

I also am looking. I do mostly animated walk-through/fly-arounds. Anyone here tried Shade 8.0? It's very affordable (200.00) Just wondering if anyone can recommend it?

@errror404 said:

@spunky said:

It seems that many architects and builders are now going in house for their renderings... is this an accurate picture?

Taking in consideration that most architecture school (I would imagine all of them) are exposing their students to cg.

Most office in the near future would be able to do in house 3d renderings. Now, it's up to you to make sure that your renderings are so far superior and marketable, that they will rather hire you than have them done in house.

leo

To expand on this, it is important to emphasize "exposed". This means they are only given cursory exposure to this technology and never get very good at it. Combine this with the experience they will get on the job doing CG (which will likely be very little as employers are more interested in billable time), they should not be of much concern. I get samples from them that show only a basic grasp of the art.

@hazza said:

@hazza said:

Then right click again -> Rotate - > 90 (or 270)

.... and if you have multiple faces that need rotating:

1. click off the face so that the coloured pins disappear but the face is still selected,
2. click the "eye dropper" in the materials dialog box,
3. sample the rotated face,
4. click any other face that needs it's texture rotated.

...and here I have been using Sketchup since 2002 and I never knew! I could have saved so much time in the past.

This program rocks (usually)!!

Thanks for this.

@remus said:

Could you post the model your having problems with? it can be pretty helpful.

As a bit of a guess it sounds like SU is just wrongly guessing about how you want to orientate the texture. You should be able to fix it by right clicking the affected face->texture->position. From there you should be able to manipulate the texture to the way you want it.

Thanks for your reply. I do know how to fix it, but then again, this shouldn't be happening at all. Oh, Well, here's the file......

Westernhills.skp

I'm having a problem applying textures in a model that does not occur in any other model I've done. When I apply textures to faces that are perpendicular to the green direction, they are fine. When I apply to faces perpendicular to red direction, they are rotated 90 degrees.

Help?