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Kitchen rendering
One feature that is missing in SketchUp, though, is photo-realistic rendering. But don’t
let that stop you… You can add high-quality rendering to the free SketchUp software
even if you don’t have any of the full-featured commercial rendering programs like 3ds
max, VRay, maxwell etc. Although there are some commercial rendering solutions
available for SketchUp (namely Twilight, Podium, VRay for SketchUp, LightUp, IDX
Renditioner – all of these integrate nicely into SketchUp and offer “one-click” rendering),
I suggest you take a look at the freeware Kerkythea. For completeness, it should be
mentioned that there are also the free renderers (with export plugins) Indigo and
POVRAY, but I (currently) prefer Kerkythea due to its great user interface, fast and great
results as well as multiprocessor support.
Kerkythea installs as a separate program and SketchUp models are converted to its XML-
based scene description language with a very seamless exporter plug-in (a Ruby-plugin).
The rendering engine then provides various rendering methods such as ray tracing,
photon mapping, path tracing, BiPT, MLT and also presets for clay and ambient
occlusion renderings. It includes a full-featured material editor and additional high-
quality materials can be downloaded from the web.
This is a sample image of a SketchUp model rendered in Kerkythea (two light emitting
planes, MLT render)
Installation
Use
The SketchUp exporter download includes a sample file that is very illustrative. It will
guide you through scene setup, light creation, modification, animation setup, export and
rendering. Go through it and you’ll be up to speed very fast. More tutorials are available
here and in their wiki. A very basic workflow goes like this:
1. Create your SketchUp model. Apply materials and position textures. Textures will
be exported and you can refine these materials in Kerkythea’s material editor.
2. Turn shadows on if you like and/or add Kerkythea light components.
3. Create animation (formerly tourguide) tabs/views. On export, these will be used
to create cameras.
4. Go to the plugins menu and export the scene. This will create an XML-file and a
sub-folder with all the textures. The exporter gives you options to export the
selected object only, export the lights or export for a clay render (no textures).
Choose as you please.
5. You can then directly open the model in Kerkythea by clicking OK one more
time. If that doesn’t work, revisit the plugin installer documentation. In any case
you will be able to open Kerkythea and load the file.
6. Select a render preset and watch the magic happen. Start with a quick “Photon
Map – Quick” preview and work your way up. Also start with a smaller size
(800×600 or less). If you have multiple processors in your machine, make sure
you use them all as this will speed up rendering.
These are some rendering types that can be done with this software:
Global Illumination:
I used quite “bland” materials here to speed up rendering time. You can set reflectivity or
bump in Kerkythea’s material editor.
Ambient Occlusion:
Set the sky color to white or grey, disable the sun and see what happens. Always looks
nice.
Image-based lighting (HDRI):
Load a spherical HDR image as a sky image in Kerkythea and you’ll get very realistic
lighting conditions.