Thursday, January 20, 2011

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.

Update: The target launch date for Shaderlight for Mac is early March.


Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist

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5 comments:

  1. UnknownJanuary 21, 2011 at 8:16 AM

    I'd like to see some examples done with the free version.

    ReplyDelete
  2. CraigJanuary 22, 2011 at 2:05 PM

    Looks incredible, it costs too much for me because it'd only be a toy, but serious architects could do great things with it.

    And I see that even official Google blogs get spammed too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJanuary 24, 2011 at 11:41 AM

    http://googlesketchup.info/
    Google sketchup or sketchup mean is just a 3D modeling programs designed for civil, mechanical engineer and filmmakers and etc which have related to

    ReplyDelete
  4. ::Naasson::January 27, 2011 at 12:44 AM

    Sketchup 'Evangelist'? What, do you preach the good news of 3D modeling to non-believers? LOL Drop the 'Evangelist' my friend, it looks absurd! Call yourself what you are...an ARTIST! Be proud of that!!! :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Martin RadespielFebruary 4, 2011 at 1:32 AM

    Der erste Schritt zum schöneren Wohnen unter Palmen.

    ReplyDelete

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