Photo-rendering with Shaderlight

If I had a nickel for every time someone asks me which renderer they should use with SketchUp, I’d have a fleet of helicopters perched on the turrets of my castle. One look at SketchUp’s Fan Photos page on Facebook is all you need to understand our community’s obsession with delicious photo-realism. There are piles of fantastic rendering tools to choose from, and more become available all the time. Happily, most of them have a “free mode” that you can use to try things out.

Shaderlight, an awfully-impressive (and relatively new) offering from ArtVPS, is one such rendering tool. Its interface is clean and straighforward, there’s a free version available and the video tutorials are easy to follow and comprehensive. It’s currently only available for Windows, but I’m told that a Mac version is in the works. Here are some tasty sample renderings to whet your appetite:

Boat interior rendering by Sully114

Rendering by Daniel Tal
Kitchen rendering by Eric Schimelpfenig
Villa interior rendering by Sully14

In the interest of fairness to all of our rendering friends, our plugins page lists some of the other tools you can investigate if photo-realism is your bag.

Making your rounded models look better

When you’re working with rounded objects whose edges have been smoothed, it’s sometimes hard to make things look good. That’s because curved surfaces don’t automatically produce a profile edge that helps to differentiate them from the background. You can see what I’m talking about in the images that follow; notice the (what I consider to be) unsatisfying outline of each of the rounded objects below?

Without Profiles turned on, rounded objects don’t stand out.

Turning on Profiles in the Styles dialog box produces a completely different result. At a Profiles setting of 2 pixels, perimeter edges become clearly visible. They’re a little chunky, though—and that’s not always the effect I’m aiming for.

Profiles that are 2 pixels thick often look too bold and cartoony.

Dialing down Profiles to 1 pixel solves the problem (see below).

Using a Profile thickness of 1 pixel makes rounded objects pop out from the background.

While this trick might seem obvious, it actually took eight years to soak into my brain. I never understood the benefit of setting my profile thickness to a single pixel. After all, edges are already that thickness—why spend the computer cycles to draw them again? Now I know. I thought others might benefit from my epiphany, embarrassingly late though it is.

It’s worth mentioning that telling SketchUp to draw Profiles can slow things down considerably if your model’s pushing the limits of your polygon budget. I only switch Profiles on when I need them.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist

iClone: Bringing your architecture to life

‘Tis the season… for software competitions! The folks at Reallusion (the talented makers of iClone) have recently launched the Bring Your Architecture to Life SketchUp & iClone Rendering Contest. With a combination of realistic materials, detailed landscape entourage objects, spiffy lighting effects and full-fledges animation, iClone is a really nice way to present your models.

If you use SketchUp on a Windows computer, you should definitely give iClone a whirl. The material incentives for entering this competition are substantial; An iPad, a Sony Cyber-shot digicam, SketchUp Pro 8 and plenty of other goodies await the winners.

The deadline for entering is midnight on December 15th, 2010. Visit the contest page on the Reallusion website for more details. Also wander over to this thread on SketchUcation—you’ll find links to tutorials and advice that should give you a jump-start, if you need one.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist