Interior perspective by senorjerome, on Flickr (CC) I meant to create a concise visual comparison of all available rendering software for SketchUp for quite a while now. To keep things organized I only added one video per software as well as links to the manufacturer’s websites and the current (February 2011) published cost. All prices are [...]

A member at the SketchUcation Forum recently asked SketchUp users for their three most popular plugins. While I am of course sad to see that non of mine made it into the list, this may serve as a timely update to an older post on my site. While we are waiting for a better plugin [...]

SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization: Beginner’s Guide (Book or eBook) The  first of these books is about architectural visualization (or rendering), a topic I have mentioned before on this site. For a few months now, this book has been available and I was fortunate to have been given a review copy by the publisher. My [...]

Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, enjoy your holidays and some relaxing time with your families. I wish you all the best for the new year! Cheers, Alex (FYI: The image was rendered with the fantastic SketchUp rendering software Twilight)

After years of us using high-quality rendering software for free, it just makes sense for their developers to eventually turn their endeavors into profit. This happened recently with Indigo and today, Ioannis Pantazopoulos, the creator of Kerkythea announced a similar move. Both have been freely available renderers for SketchUp and other 3D modeling applications. Here [...]

I recently needed a medium-size studio setup with gradient background and nice lighting for some SketchUp models that I wanted to render in Kerkythea. Since I couldn’t find anything suitable, I just made one. This is a 16′x16′x16′ studio setup for rendering and presentation. It contains a smooth background and two emitter/reflector faces on the [...]

These are some interesting SketchUp links that just came across my desk: SketchUcation You most probably know this link if you are working with SketchUp regularly – mainly from their great forum. One recent change: They updated their website to now include a lot of tutorials ranging from the beginner to the advanced level. In [...]

Inspired by one of David Fano’s recent blog posts, I decided to give Rhino’s Grasshopper plugin (formerly called Explicit History) a try. It is pretty amazing what can be done with it and how easy it is to use. I haven’t venture too far at this point – there’ll be more to come when I [...]

After a year of amazing development work, the team behind the freeware rendering engine Kerkythea finally released the 2008 version. It is called “Echo” and features some major improvements. While the most noticeable one will be the redesigned sleek user interface (it now has scrollable material list menus!!!), some under-the-hood improvements are worth mentioning, too.

Digging through the Ruby script archive for SketchUp is just amazing. There is a great tool at every corner. Here’s one of them: The 6-sided cube panorama exporter. Together with a renderer like Kerkythea (and a stitching program), it is extremely easy to create realistic panoramas right out of SketchUp.