

Whether you’re animating for Pixar or using SketchUp to render your parents’ basement renovation, V-Ray will show you the way to the promised land.

V-Ray is simply the best when it comes to providing true-to-life results in just about every rendering category imaginable. V-Ray for SketchUp offers the precision, accuracy, and flexibility the program always has, but in a package that users can navigate and implement with ease. It’s trajectory hasn’t given an inch as it has been continually developed into a rendering program at the top of its class. Just like Maxwell, V-Ray has been around since the beginning. It provides an incredibly fast work environment that doesn’t require you to sit around while a bunch of draft renderings are produced just so you can change things and try again. Keyshot is a capable rendering engine, yes, but it’s real magic comes from the ability to view your rendered scene in real-time as you tweak materials, massing, camera, and lighting conditions. SketchUp models are easy enough to interface into the program via a downloadable extension, allowing Keyshot to take things from there. While Keyshot has yet to release a proper plugin for SketchUp, the relative newcomer on the block is such a powerful tool it’d be a shame not to mention it here. It comes packaged with a robust material library that is filled to the brim with textures and colors that architects and interior designers frequently use. It’s tools are not only compatible with the software itself, but with the way architects’ minds are trained to work from a perspective of development, process, and workflow.Īrtlantis released a plugin for SketchUp around two years ago, and has continued to develop it so that it works hand in hand with the tools and camera techniques of the base program. This, along with a stripped-down user interface, make it the perfect rendering companion to SketchUp. 2 | ArtlantisĪrtlantis was developed specifically with architects and design professionals in mind. Maxwell is worth every penny, especially when paired with the fastest modeling tool on the planet. You’ll be rendering in mere seconds, and with a little practice, be using SketchUp in ways you could have never imagined. The development team at Next Limit have done an admiral job at creating a plugin for SketchUp that is not only incredibly easy to install, it’s streamlined in a way that users will feel like it’s a natural extension of the program they know and love.

It’s been ubiquitous with the industry since the beginning, offering some of the most powerful rendering physics that produce incredibly real-looking images and animations. Maxwell has been around since your parents were toying around with this new thing called ‘rendering software’ back in the last 1990’s. Here is the best rendering software to use with SketchUp.

These programs are marketed towards architects looking to keep their visualization work in house without having to hire an expensive, dedicated rendering artist to keep on staff. The rendering software in this list is some of the best in the world, and all provide streamlined plugins for use within the SketchUp experience. It’s easy enough for clients to understand, and nuanced enough for architects and designers to quickly build their designs in digital space and get instant feedback about massing, proportion, and circulation.īut, when you start to add extensions and plugins, you can transform SketchUp into a one-stop visualization shop that allows users to create photorealistic renderings, animations, and walkthroughs that will wow clients and strengthen the design process. As a base program, SketchUp has been developed into a powerhouse 3D modeler that just about anyone with a computer and an internet connection.
