Free rendering plugins for sketchup.

[Hudson Carpentry]

Im still getting used to using sketchup and don't want to spend money on a program im unsure ill continue to use. So can anyone recommend a rendering plugin thats free?

Thank you.

 

[SketchUp Guru]

Kerkythea.

 

[Hudson Carpentry]

Thank you.

How do I get the sketchup models into it. Sketchup will only allow me to save in skp or export in kmz, dae formats which isn't supported by Kerkythea?

 

[SketchUp Guru]

You need to use SU2KT which is also available on the Kerkythia Downloads page. It's a plugin for SketchUp that will give you the export options and the ability to insert lights and so on. I would suggest that you look at the tutorials, too.

 

[Hudson Carpentry]

Ah thank you. I was looking for lights last nights, Whats a fast way to show a plane as a mirror. I used the glass sky colour but lightened but looks ok, I feel it could be better though?

 

[SketchUp Guru]

You need to edit the material you've used on the material. There are some material libraries you can download. There's at least one plastic library and there are some metal libraries. You could set the material to one of the shiny plastics or metals and use that or you could manually set the characteristics of the material to create the material.

I don't use it enough to remember off the top of my head exactly how to make the settings but I may have time this weekend to set up a s GoToMeeting session and we could look at it together.

 

[Hudson Carpentry]

I think ill download some more material packs, the wood materials that come with sketchup are horrid and not that useful. A google for sketchup material packs or do you know a good place to get some.

Im out photographing a wedding this weekend but thank you for the offer. Ill find something im happy with and tweak with the settings till im happy or even make my own material, I guess making my own is a similar method to other 3D programs?

 

[SketchUp Guru]

As to the material packs for KT, they are very good. Good materials to use directly in SU, not so easy to find. If the materials in the material packs for KT work for you, don't worry about what you paint the surfaces with in SU. Replace them once you get to KT.

You can Google for wood grain images and import them into SU to use as materials but often the images are too small or poorly lit so they tile badly. There are a couple of wood grain libraries that have been made for SketchUp but in my opinion, they aren't much better than the materials that come with SketchUp.

FWIW, at least the cherry material that comes with SketchUp is way too large. I don't know why that is but it is easy to edit if you apply it in a model. You can then save the edited material back to the Wood library letting it overwrite the original. The other woodgrain images may suffer the same problem but I don't remember for sure and I believe I delted them anyway.

 

[Hudson Carpentry]

Once again Dave thank you!