Hi All,

I am on the hunt for a renderer. I have been looking around and there are so many options its doing my head in, your help and suggestions would be very much appreciated as I see many of you have a huge amount of experience!
Below I have done my best to list requirements and my thoughts so far..

I am doing architectural type work Interiors/exteriors in Sketchup, so I need a seamless workflow with sketchup and a suitable renderer.

Each project I do involves creating a model of a building, then doing about 40 renders of that building focusing on different areas, each shown in various states (Lights on/lights off mainly). (Possibly Maxwells multilight, Fryrender lightmixer/swap would be good??)

Ideally I could apply materials and IES lights once to the model in sketchup, apply render settings, view the results in real time and then be able to render all the scenes of the sketchup file. Batch rendering seems like a necessity.

Biased renderer would be fine - I would sacrifice a bit of photorealism for faster render times. (Possibly VRay rather than maxwell?)

Animation would be a plus (not required now but would be good for future)

The smaller the learning curve the better, while I am prepared to spend time on learning, the boss wants it now. I have some experience rendering with a product design background using hypershot/keyshot/bunkspeed shot, dabbled in kerkythea.

A big community/forum/material library would be amazing!

Ideally for both Mac and Windows platforms.

CPU or GPU, im not sure whats better or what will be better in the future. At this stage im leaning to CPU so it can run on existing hardware. We will need to upgrade soon anyway though so please dont let that influence your suggestion too much.

Finding the best solution is more important than the price at this point.

Below is an image which demonstrates the type of renders im after...

Thank you in advance for your help and suggestions!!

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