Juju, I think you are probably correct in your concept of what real time rendering means is this case. Here is a link to an almost identical scene as the first animation, but the shadows are clearly there in the first part of animation, which I think shows it is rendering with shadows rather quickly.

http://blip.tv/file/1144509

How intuitiv is SU, compare to that huge drawing monster. Really impressive, but like others friends , the GUI is so rich that you sink and hardly swim between the
features..

Let me back to SU6 , even SU 7....

MALAISE.

@unknownuser said:

..and, guess what the top feature highlights will be:

some greatly improved features for google warehouse and google earth!!!

many new and ultra cool styles!!!!!

I have to agree with numerobis; I kind of think google will focus on unimportant aspects like these -- things that fit into the larger 'google' world, but have little value for SU as an individual program. SU 6, for example, was a letdown. I don't care for layout and the line types are a waste of time. What else did it add? They talked a lot about improved ruby support, or something, but I haven't seen the improvements they said would happen because of that [Can any of you programmer-types comment on this at all?]

SU is an amazing program for what it is and they should highlight that. While a very basic rendering engine for quick light studies would be nice, it would be a waste of time to include anything more than that, as there are so many great choices out there [free and otherwise].

The silly line types they've added feels to me just like a tacky photoshop edit -- hopefully they won't waste development time adding to that.

This is what I would love to see:

multi-core support
better efficiency at handling large models
a 'loft' feature
the shadow glitch to be fixed

These, I think, would fundamentally improve SU and its usability.
While there are other things that I feel would be important to add, most of these can be found in the great rubys that have been coming out lately [think bevel, subdivision, ffd, etc.] If anything it would be nice for google to incorporate some of these plugins and clean them up a little.

Thanks, I'll have a look.

Thanks for the ideas. I will definitly try them.

Canoek, your version is really neat.

Thx for the heads up Phil, I'm sure a lot of people could find this useful. 👍

Wow, despite of the polycount it could still be a very handy program! Thanks Phil (and of course, welcome to the forums though I see you haven't just recently registered) 😄

I think you should also post this in the Hardware & Software section.