Thea Render is one of the few commercial renderers that can offer both biased and unbiased render engines. Biased/unbiased is a question about accuracy of render algorithm, biased rendering do make some shortcuts for faster results that are needed for animations and so. With it user has a control on every aspect and parameter of render engines. Unbiased rendering is progressive by it's nature, it does offer a easy, parameter free and highly accurate, but slower rendering. You can use the same scene no matter witch engine you choose to use. Thea and SU both do use OpenGL for displaying the workspace, so one can say that even reasonable "light" GPU can handle the burden (even integrated display adapter might be enough). Later Thea will have GPU accelerated rendering, but at the moment just your system should work just fine with Thea. With i7 and 16 GB RAM it's hard to choke Thea as it does benefit from 64-bit OS - you can render more complex scenes and use more freely some features like relight (as available RAM is the main limiter). You can freely test Thea, with resolution limited and watermarked version. If you want to compare render time for 720p or higher, it will raise linearly related resolution change. So even with a smaller test render you can estimate how long it would take to render some higher resolution image... Please, be free to join to Thea Render forums for further questions. ps here is some interesting music & relight experiments by Wax http://www.youtube.com/user/wax78/videos?query=relight

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

@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. You can find equally powerful laptops from many other companies that cost less than alienware does too. Other than the M11x (which is essentially a gaming netbook) their lowest base price listed at the moment is $1,200 USD before taxes and shipping. If you are looking to get bang-for-your-buck hardware, then alienware is usually at the bottom of the list. The problem with alienware is that they have so much brand-hype and marketing behind their systems that they charge far more than what would otherwise be available elsewhere. $750-$1000 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100006740%204022&IsNodeId=1&ShowDeactivatedMark=False Just for some "budget" examples. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220921 1200 dollars for that, and that laptop outperforms my desktop. My desktop is no slouch, and cost more than that just for the tower. The problem with that m17x alienware unit is that you are paying extra for the nvidia 3dvision. Do you really need that?

@hazza said: @hazza said: Then right click again -> Rotate - > 90 (or 270) .... and if you have multiple faces that need rotating: click off the face so that the coloured pins disappear but the face is still selected, click the "eye dropper" in the materials dialog box, sample the rotated face, 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.