Tutorial SketchUp to Thea for Beginners

Make a simple cube say (10 x 10 x 10) in sketchup. (we are making it to scale because Thea materials behave realistically, will discuss that later) Add a color, say A12 from the materials menu. Apply the material to the entire cube.

Since we would like to see shadows in our render, select the view shadows option as shown above. It is notable here that in order to view shadows in Thea you need to have a surface on which the shadows fall. We will now draw a surface below the cube which will receive these shadows. (this can be considered analogous to ground in a real life scenario)

Here we have drawn a surface below the cube to enclose the shadow of the cube.

We apply our second material Color_004 from the material menu.

Now go to plugins > Thea Exporter> Main export window and click. A SU-2-Thea toolbar opens up as seen here. It has a lot of options do not be confused or daunted looking at them. The first option Model allows us to select what all features of the model to export into thea. We let the default options selected. Next click on the Scenes tab below the Model Tab.

This gives the Scene settings that you will be taking into thea. Here you can change the camera resolution which at default is set to the resolution of the sketchup window on the screen. We will let it be. Though you can experiment to see the effect changing your camera resolution or aspect ratio has.

Next select the Rendering Tab: It has 3 options available in the select rendering method drop down menu. Adaptive BSD Unbiased TR1 Unbiased TR2 A note here:
Adaptive BSD is a biased format of rendering which involves a lot of tweaks when in thea but can give fastest results while rendering. TR1 is best used for exteriors and interior renders where there are no caustics involved (caustics are the colored reflections one sees when light passes through a colored glass) Where caustics are involved and a lot of reflections TR2 can be used to get optimal results.

Its a matter of speed vs quality and for now the scene being really small we stick to TR1. ISO, Shutter speed and F number are camera settings. For interior renders you may want to jack up the ISO values and lesser the shutter speed. We keep them untouched here.

TR2 is the slowest and TR1 gives the best results with minimum tweaks but takes more time when compared to BSD.

We now click on the material tab. Here you will see a notification asking you to click on a surface to select the material. This is basically used to set up materials for rendering in thea right inside sketchup. Double click on any side of the cube and it selects Color_A12 and opens up the Thea Material Lab.

This is what Thea Material Editor will look like. The menu on the left side has Matlab texlab matlab2 texturesbrowser and exit options. Apart from exit all the others are used to toggle on or off the respective options. In this image apart from Matlab2 all the tabs are displayed. You can quit Material Editor if you want to use the sketchup material. But you can apply any of the thea materials here if you want to. Lets apply a wood material to the selected material. Click on the folder marked wood. Select wood05 varnished. Once done exit. You now return to your sketchup tab and it shows that wood05 varnished has been selected for the given material. We are now back inside sketchup. For the second material (color_004) we will not edit the material and export the Sketchup material. We are now ready to move to Thea Studio. Click on Export Model.

better understand how materials and material editor work check out the tutorial section of the website we have 4 NOTE: To tutorials pertaining to editing materials, textures etc.

This is the Interactive Render Toolbar. You can use this to make a quick render of you 3d model to get a feel of how your model is going to look. The Render button. Rolling the mouse over various options in this bar tells what they are. For more info refer the Interactive Render Video already posted by the Thea Team.

Hit the orange button in the Interactive Render Toolbar to stop the render when you are done. You can click on the floppy icon in the same toolbar to save the rendered image as you please.. This is used for your final renders once you are satisfied with the results in the IR (Interactive Renderer).

Now lets change the wood material of the cube. Click on the cube to select it. Once selected you can change the material by browsing and selecting any of the thea materials. (Ive selected lime metallic in the metallic car paints folder.) Once the new material has been selected, select the darkroom tab marked out above.

Click on the Render button marked above and then click the tick mark in orange. Now sit back and watch as Thea works its way towards your final render. This is an unbiased render so you can choose how sharp you want the image to be. The greater the no. of passes in the Phase bar (just to the left of the render button), greater the clarity.

This is the result after 15 passes. There are lots of options you can play with in the display panel. Try various crf marked in red, by clicking in the box next to CRF and then toggling the various options and seeing their effects. Whenever you are happy with the final render, click on the stop button marked in green and then click on the save button marked in blue to save the image to a location of your choice.

This is what your final render should look like. Ive used Afghacolor vista 100cd. Crf and Radial in the glare options and saved this image.
Hope someone out there finds this small tutorial helpful. Really appreciate your reading this if youve made it till here

JOE AVERAGE