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.

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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.

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Quickly creating 3D-models and doing sketchy renderings is clearly the strength of Google SketchUp. The full modeling feature set is even available in the free version and with downloadable Ruby plugins, anything is possible.

One feature that is missing in SketchUp, though, is photo-realistic rendering. But don't let that stop you...

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