Monday, October 12, 2009

Google SketchUP !!

Have you ever seen what sketchup can do? Well, it is a free piece of 3D modelling software from Google! You can download it for free over at Google.com! Just search for Sketchup. Now, it is all great, and extremely easy to use. But there is one small problem!

It creates boring, very square looking images, example:
Taken off google.


So, you want to make your 3D modells look more realistic, and you want to do it free! Sure.. here are a couple of rendering plugins for Sketchup i found. Both look great!

1. Kerkythea
Can make images look like this, by U3dreal


Kerkythea is a standalone renderer, using physically accurate materials and lights, aiming for the best quality rendering in the most efficient timeframe. The target of Kerkythea is to simplify the task of quality rendering by providing the necessary tools to automate scene setup, such as staging using the GL real-time viewer, material editor, general/render settings editors, etc., under a common interface.

The development of the Kerkythea (KT) application began in September (2004) without having much time to invest on the application at that time. The good thing, is that it started with the kernel and libraries of Phos (an older render engine), so a big part of the source code was already tested and well structured.

It took more than half a year before Kerkythea was finally born (April 2005)! In that phase, the first users were not so many but there were enthusiasts that joined my efforts and gave substantial feedback. Seeing that a general weakness of other render engines was the lack of an interface, I decided to make a turn and enhance the user interface even more. The enhanced version was based on Fox toolkit, with the additional benefit of KT becoming platform independent (October 2005).

2. Indigo
ndigo is a photorealistic renderer which simulates the physics of light to achieve near-perfect image realism. By combining an industrial-strength renderer with a high quality exporter for SketchUp, you can create great images directly from SketchUp.

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