plug-ins. su podium Archives

SketchUp for Absolute Beginners

Posted on September 09, 2022December 12, 2023 by Lauren Donnebaum

Maybe you’ve seen it in action. Perhaps you’ve seen the awe-inspiring results for yourself. You might be a complete newbie. Whatever your situation, you’re keen to learn SketchUp and SketchUp student seems like an excellent way to kick start the journey. Welcome to our SketchUp tutorials for beginners. We hope you find it inspiring. SketchUp is the easiest way to learn 3-D modelling, which explains why some people dive right in. But if things don’t go right straight away, it’s frustrating. We’re taking things right back to the beginning here. By the end of this article you’ll know what you can do with SketchUp, how to set it up, understand the interface, learn the basics and find your way around the many brilliant free learning resources on offer. To make your first SketchUp experience a fantastic one, read on.

What You Can Do with SketchUp

So you’re new to SketchUp. You’re going to love this. Let’s kick off with insight into what can be achieved with SketchUp. For a start, it’s super- easy to learn SketchUp 3D drawing. The software just happens to contain every function you could imagine. Simple to use with an infinity of complex results, this is the ideal tool for drawing in 2D and outputting your work to dramatic 3D.

All you need to do is get a few basic skills behind you to be able to create professional 3D designs. It’s perfect for bringing bright ideas to life quickly and accurately. It won’t take you long to master the art of making accurate, scaled 2D and 3D drawings. Harnessing LayOut to create professional elevations, plans and sections gives you even more flexibility to make magic happen.

You can also use LayOut to generate powerful presentations and influential vector illustrations, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. SketchUp Pro comes with a wow factor to help you delight your clients and convince colleagues in the shape of realistic walkthroughs, impressive flyovers and animations that explain a thousand words in an instant.

No wonder SketchUp is so widely used by professional architects, interior designers, graphic artists, product designers, game designers and more. Basically if you want to draw it, you can draw it in Sketchup.

Setting up SketchUp

Here’s where you start. First, how to download SketchUp. There are several versions, one of which will be perfect for you. As a total beginner, you’ll probably want to download SketchUp for Higher Education or a free 7 day SketchUp trial. Then there’s SketchUp Free. They all give you everything you need to be inspired, get designing, finish projects and present them the SketchUp way. All for no fee.

SketchUp Free lets you discover basic 3D modeling on the web.
SketchUp Pro is a desktop application you use via your browser, Chromebook or iPad. It gives you access to 4M + pre-built 3D models, an augmented reality mobile viewer, and unlimited cloud storage as well as all the design functionality you can imagine. It provides 2D design documentation, quick insights for design research, XR headset viewing, and access to plugins to extend SketchUp functionality even more.
SketchUp for Higher Education is yours with SketchUp Studio, available in three versions for students, educators, and universities. The student version allows you to make stunning accurate 3D models. The educator version is all about using intuitive, powerful modelling tools in the classroom. And the university version is tailored to using the core modeling suite, designed for your uni.
SketchUp for Schools is a free version for primary or secondary schools signed up to G Suite for Education. It lets youngsters enjoy free, intuitive 3D modeling tools designed to boost kids’ creative expression and develop exciting skills from a young age. It is both highly accessible and easy to experiment with.

Get to Know the Sketchup User Interface

Dive in unprepared and you might get lost. Avoid that by dedicating time to really understand the user interface, one of the best ways to learn SketchUp quickly. It’s lovely to use and won’t take you long to become confident in what it offers, and where everything is. The icons are clear and obvious, and everything is where you expect it to be.

Every version of SketchUp, including SketchUp Student, provides you with an intuitive, easy to learn 3-D drawing tool. But its simplicity hides a complex treasure trove of functionality. It makes a lot of sense to run before you walk, so exercise patience! Plenty of the more complicated and involved functions are hidden from view to keep things visually clear, clean and logical. You’ll quickly learn where they are, and as soon as you do you’ll fly.

Explore the menus in detail. Make it your mission to get familiar with all the amazing features and functions that don’t show up in the toolbars. Treat it like an expedition into the nuts and bolts of SketchUp, an exciting place where everything is possible when you know where to look. Once you’ve done that, it’s a dream to actually use the software. You’ll be so much more fluent from the start.

The SketchUp Quick Reference Card is your best friend. Everyone loves it, from highly experienced users to beginners like you. Print it out if you like, stick it in a frame, tape it to your desk, or bookmark the online versions for instant access to clever shortcuts, hot tips and handy hints. It’s an exciting destination revealing the sheer flexibility of this cool 3D design tool.

Watch SketchUp Video Tutorials

While we all learn in different ways, most of us benefit from digesting information in more than one way. That’s where SketchUp video tutorials come in, an excellent way to know useful stuff quickly in a clear and inspiring visual context. Take a look at the videos presented from the SketchUp Campus, which we cover in the next section. And hook up with SketchUp on YouTube, your source of a multitude of video content covering a huge range of SketchUp essentials, basics, projects, and more.

There are specific YouTube playlists to dive into, including SketchUp Basics for education. Created for K-12 educators and students, it’s all about getting started with making models in SketchUp. It reveals everything you need to know about launching SketchUp, choosing a template, knowing toolsets, and navigating within your model, ideal for absolute beginners. At just under three minutes long it’s a quick win, and there are eight in the set. There’s also a 4-part suite of videos about how to get started in SketchUp. And that’s just for a start.

Learn SketchUp Basics

It’s just like any new skill. You need to learn SketchUp basics before you can get properly creative. Now’s the time to learn the absolute SketchUp basics, and SketchUp Campus is a great destination. The SketchUp Fundamentals course. It gives you the fundamental building blocks for all your SketchUp models, covering the toolset and sharing some excellent tips and tricks for complex and simple functions. Take a look at Part 1 of the course and see how you get on.

There’s more. Loads more. Campus contains a host of fantastic courses, many broken down into digestible chunks you’ll enjoy. Commercial Interiors, for example, contains 22 Lessons and the Layout Design Package contains 18 Lessons. You can explore how to render SketchUp to Photoshop, find out all about Scan Essentials, discover LayOut essentials and more.

Get to Know SketchUp Shortcuts

Everyone loves a shortcut and there are plenty of them to learn in SketchUp, all created to make designing easier. SketchUp Shortcut keys are a series of instant ways to activate tools and commands via your keyboard. Because they speed things up, they support a fester, smoother design workflow.

Here’s an example. Say you’re using the R key to activate the Rectangle tool. You don’t have to move your mouse away from your drawing to a toolbar or menu. And you don’t need to interrupt your thoughts either. Inside SketchUp you can look up and use shortcut keys via the Search tool. For every tool and command, you’ll find a brief description and a reminder of the keyboard shortcut assigned to it. You can also use mouse shortcuts, the most important of which activates the Orbit tool. All you do is hold down the mouse scroll wheel.

If you’re using Chrome or Microsoft Edge you’re in luck. They are the best ways to experience shortcuts in SketchUp for Web.

If there isn’t a shortcut for the tools you use most, you can make your own. It’s all about customising shortcuts. Either add a shortcut to a tool that doesn’t have one, or reassign a default shortcut to any tool or command in Search. To assign a shortcut, find the tool in Search. Then hover over it and click on the shortcut key, or the empty box where you want to put your own shortcut.

Learning and using keyboard shortcuts for SketchUp will save you so much time. Every shortcut you master will mean you can get rid of another toolbar, giving you an even cleaner, simpler interface to enjoy.

It’s good to start by learning shortcuts for tools that you use most. Here are some popular default shortcuts:

Select (Space bar)
Line (L)
Eraser (E)
Arc (A)
Rectangle (R)
Circle (C)
Push/Pull (P)
Paint Bucket (B)
Move (M)
Rotate (Q)
Scale (S)
Tape measure (T)

Join the SketchUp Community

We recommend you join the SketchUp Community Forum to learn SketchUp fast. It’s a friendly and welcoming place where you can either post a question of your own or explore a multitude of existing questions already answered by dedicated lovers of the programme.

There’s more hot community action over at the SketchUp Reddit Community, which has more than 26,000 members and dates back to 2010. More than two decades of expertise awaits you, complete with all sorts of inspiring posts from users all around the world.

The SketchUp Facebook page is a lively place to find inspiration, knowledge, insight, tips and more, frequently updated to keep things interesting. And we’re on LinkedIn as well, the business network where the world’s professionals showcase their wares. Last but not least you can find us here on Twitter UK, home to our latest tweets.

It’s good to know there are so many places you can engage with, connect with and interact with SketchUp pros and community members. Social media give you another key resource to support learning excellence from the get-go.

Use SketchUp Plugins and Extensions

SketchUp plugins and extensions are both the same kind of thing. They’re tools to give you added functionality. The SketchUp extensions collection is categorised into animation, developer tools, energy analysis, import and export, landscape architecture, rendering, scheduling, 3D printing, architecture, drawing tools, film and stage, interior design, productivity, reporting , plus text and labelling. As you can tell, it provides an enormous suite of free resources created for and by the community. You’ll find them here in the Extensions Warehouse.

The SketchUp Plugin Store, Sketchucation, is full of excellent plugins for every imaginable function. Universal Importers and Curve to Arc creation, Crop Selection and Find Gap plugins, urban design plugins, plugins for scale, boundaries, cuisine and more.

Use the SketchUp 3D Warehouse

Whatever version you use – SketchUp Student, Pro or something else – the 3D Warehouse is an enormous resource containing hundreds of free to use, ready-made items. It’s a library of custom third party extensions designed to help optimise your SketchUp workflow. Complete with 600+ extensions and a team of developers who are constantly creating new ways to hack your workflow, it is categorised into ‘industry’ and ‘workflow’. It provides a wealth of useful tools, all of which integrate smoothly with SketchUp Pro. Categorised in the same way as the Extensions Warehouse, it offers users an exciting and very wide choice of imagery.

Take a look at the wonderful animals category for a start. It contains all sorts of artwork to download and use, including wall art, drawings and paintings, wallpaper and textures. Then there’s Building Materials, stuffed full of essentials and creative approaches to the imagery you need. If you need it and don’t fancy drawing it yourself, it’s probably already in the 3D Warehouse.

Shadow an experienced user

Last of all, can you shadow an experienced user? You’ll learn SketchUp faster than ever when sitting next to someone who’s using the programme fast, fluidly and confidently, and it’ll give you an exciting insight into the pleasure of using this top class 3D design tool. Happy learning!

Rendering in SketchUp: 5 of the Best SketchUp Rendering Plugins

Posted on August 31, 2022February 09, 2024 by Lauren Donnebaum

You want a brilliant SketchUp rendering plugin? One that’ll render your work into a stunning image designed to convince, inspire, and clarify your ideas for clients and other stakeholders? No worries! While it’s great that there are so many plugins to choose from, on the other hand it’s handy to have a curated list of the best performers in town. This article reveals five of the very best SketchUp rendering plugins, perfect when you’re busy researching rendering plugins for SketchUp but are short of time. We do the hard work for you. Read on for a shortlist of the best. By the end of this article you’ll know which rendering tools to go and test before making your final choice.

What is Rendering?

First, let’s define what happens with the SketchUp rendering plugin. It’s called Rendering and it involves generating a two or three-dimensional image from a model via an app. It’s usually used in architecture, video games, animated movies, simulators, special effects for TV, and to visualise designs in real-life detail.

The techniques and features of a rendering tool vary depending on the project, but it always increases design efficiency, reduces design costs, and provides the level of clarity and inspiration needed to help stakeholders sign off a project.

There are two kinds of rendering, pre-rendering and real-time rendering. Both kinds of rendering use three main computing techniques: Scanline, Raytracing, and Radiosity. The difference is in the speed your computer can do the job. Real-time rendering is usually used to make super-fast interactive graphics and gaming, in an environment where user interaction is unusually high. Dedicated graphics hardware and pre-compiling of information has made real-time rendering so much more powerful than it used to be.

Pre-rendering is better for projects where speed isn’t a factor. The calculations used to make the image harness multi-core central processing units instead of dedicated graphics kit, making it most useful for animation and visual effects, where top quality photorealism is essential.

Rendering in SketchUp involves using a variety of really good plugins and extensions. Here are five of the most popular, all highly rated by the team at SketchUp and the program’s users.

V-RAY

The V-Ray Sketchup rendering plugin has been transforming SketchUp models into photorealistic renderings and animations for a few years. It has fast gained popularity, partly because it’s so easy to install and get started with, giving users access to the power of the world’s most-used renderer to enhance the speed and flexibility of SketchUp. No wonder V-Ray is among the most widely used Sketchup rendering tools. It comes with all this great functionality:

Real-time rendering – helping you create stunning visual presentations in seconds to convince clients, managers, teams and other stakeholders
Real-world cameras
Animation & virtual reality
Stylized renders to take you beyond photorealism into the thrilling realm of cartoons, illustrations, even watercolour paintings
Light gen: Simulate a range of natural lighting options for interior and exterior scenes with just a few clicks and easily select the right ambiance
Light mix: Create dozens of lighting scenarios from a single render — without re-rendering.
Lighting analysis
Materials library
Texture map
Improved sky model & custom orientation
Frame Buffer

How much is V-Ray for SketchUp? V-Ray for SketchUp costs $350 per year. You can also buy the V-Ray Collection, which includes 15 fantastic products for $699 per year. Where to get it? You can download V-Ray from the ‘My Products’ page in your user Trimble account. Find out more here.

V-Ray in SketchUp, ‘Las Tunusas’ – Author credit: David Santos

V-Ray in SketchUp, ‘Train Pavillion’ – Author credit: Alex Hogrefe

SU Podium

SU Podium is a SketchUp rendering plugin favourite with architects and interior designers. They love the way it’s so easy to generate detailed and life-like architectural visualisations from a detailed SketchUp model fast and easily. The SketchUp Render Plugin SU Podium uses a high-end, biased raytracing engine plus a remarkable physical sky system, along with a set of carefully calibrated presets, all of which make SketchUp rendering straightforward and enjoyable. Because SU Podium runs 100% inside SketchUp itself you get the high quality rendering you want without having to click out of SketchUp. In a world where every minute counts, it matters. It’s very easy to use, too. And it does all this:

Raytracing – a rendering technique that makes incredibly realistic lighting via an algorithm that traces the path of light, then simulates the way it should fall
Global illumination via algorithms designed to create hyper-realistic lighting to 3D scenes
Realistic materials so the final result is as convincing and lifelike as possible
Sun and sky, plus artificial lighting, means anything is possible
Panoramic rendering
HDR image-based rendering

How much is SU Podium? SU Podium costs $259 for a permanent licence, with upgrades ranging from $19 to $59. You can download SU Podium here.

Example of SU Podium for SketchUp from http://supodium.zenfolio.com/

Example SU Podium for SketchUp from http://supodium.zenfolio.com/

Check out more incredible panoramic views here!

Enscape

Enscape is another very popular SketchUp rendering plugin, a great virtual reality and real-time rendering plugin for SketchUp. It takes just one click to start Enscape. Within seconds you’ll be experiencing your project fully rendered, with no uploading to the cloud or exporting to other programmes.

All the changes you’ve made in SketchUp are available instantly for you to evaluate in Enscape, letting you explore different design options fast and present projects to clients in the right kind of inspiring detail. If your client wants to see how something different will look, you can reveal the changes in gorgeous 3D straight away, even in VR. If you want to create stunning fly-bys and walkthroughs, you can also do that from inside the plugin. It comes with these fab features:

Real-time walk-through tours to inspire and delight clients and other stakeholders
Virtual reality presentations so real it’s like seeing the genuine design, built
An asset library
Collaboration tools to help with team-led projects
Varied export functions

How much is Enscape? Enscape costs $67.90 per month for a full version license users can share across multiple machines. It costs $39.90 for a fixed-seat license for a single machine and there’s a 14-day free trial to play with. You can download Enscape here.

Thea

Thea Render for SketchUp is a very popular, highly rated and very fast SketchUp rendering plugin, another of the best Sketchup rendering plugins. It combines powerful Thea rendering engines with the simplicity of SketchUp. It delivers biased, unbiased and interactive render modes – including GPU support – to your fingertips inside SketchUp view, and all this makes rendering in Thea a joy. There’s a built in library and the tool is compatible with handy Sketchup extensions including Skatter.

Thea Render comes with these key features:

Interactive rendering automatically updates rendered image in real time as you make changes, great for transforming objects, changing and creating materials, changing the lights, cameras, and almost any other part of the scene you’ve rendered
Advanced material editor
Light editing tool
Section cuts
Adaptive tracing
Relight Editor for creating infinite images from just one render
Proxy Material editing
Proxy creation
AI Denoising, accurately distinguishing real image details and ‘noise’
Fog and cloud presets for atmospheric realistic lighting effects

How much is Thea Render? Thea Render costs $280 for an annual licence, and $675 for a 3-year licence. You can get the plugin here.

LightUp

LightUp is a really good tool for creating high quality renderings as well as beautiful stills, compelling AVI movies and cool panoramas. A popular choice, it’s also one of the best SketchUp rendering plugins. It comes with all this:

Real-time walkthroughs to inspire colleagues and clients
Light sources to give your design a hyper-real feel
Lux and Insolation analysis – insolation measures the power of the sun’s light over time and surface area, and lux is defined as lumens per square metre
Hi-res renderings, stills, AVI, panoramas

How much does Light Up cost? Light Up costs $189 for an annual licence, and $349 for a perpetual licence. There’s a 7-day free trial available, and you can download the plugin here.

Where to Find Sketchup Extensions and Plugins

This is just a shortlist of the best SketchUp rendering plugins, of course. There are many more rendering tools available, plus many other useful SketchUp extensions for every imaginable design and presentation circumstance. You can find, explore and download Sketchup Extensions in the popular Extension Warehouse, here. You might want to check out a multitude of excellent SketchUp tutorials here, and download SketchUp Pro here.

If you’d like a free trial of any of these products, send us an email (sales@elmtec.co.uk).

SketchUp for Architects

Posted on August 03, 2022December 12, 2023 by Lauren Donnebaum

Are you researching SketchUp for architects? Good move! SketchUp is brilliant for architecture, your logical, simple and highly creative solution to stunning architectural drawings and remarkable designs. Perfect for representing hyper-realistic interiors and exteriors, it’s exactly what you need to impress clients, convince stakeholders, and share your ideas with colleagues and managers. SketchUp architect is a comprehensive, flexible tool set that brings your imagination to life in no time with superb 2D and 3D design. If you work in architectural design it’s an enjoyable way to achieve great things quickly and easily. And it’s rich in resources with masses of tutorials to tap into as well as a multitude of brilliant plugins and extensions. So let’s go on a voyage of discovery into SketchUp architecture. By the end of this article you’ll know exactly why it’s such a good idea to design buildings in SketchUp.

SketchUp Tips for Architects

First of all, as a SketchUp architect you’re never short of cool resources. There’s an abundance of excellent tutorials and guidance for architects, however experienced you are and whatever your skill levels. Take a tour of the SketchUp website to join the latest 3D Basecamp Conference, grab a Bootcamp ticket for top class training, or do both.

You’ll find a free trial to download and test drive for a full 7 days, more than enough time to get to grips with the programme. There’s SketchUp Campus to explore, for in-depth SketchUp training at your own pace. There’s a list of expert SketchUp Trainers who can help you, and a whole load of top class video content to consume on YouTube, including a three part series about learning SketchUp Architecture.

There’s a Help Centre stacked with SketchUp Pro tips, tutorials, and user guides. Plus forums to ask your own questions and find answers to existing questions, release notes to update you on every new version, and – last but not least – SketchUp Quick Reference Cards to make your design life even easier, faster, and more enjoyable.

SketchUp Plugins and Extensions for Architects

SketchUp architect plugins and extensions give you a huge resource supported by an enormous community of keen and creative users. No wonder this is one of the most popular digital design software programmes. Large companies contribute, as do indie developers working on exciting new plugins and extensions, delivering a growing wealth of functionality to users. Harness the right plug-ins for a specific task and you’ll save time and hassle. There’s a vast amount to choose from, easy to narrow down by category or industry, or via reviews from the architectural community.

Plugins and extensions are much the same thing, simple tools that do very specific things for designers in no time at all, often via clever shortcuts. You might want to choose from an abundance of realistic-looking trees to save having to design trees yourself. There’s a free plugin called Architextures, which you use for creating and editing seamless textures, bump maps and hatches. 3D Bazaar gives you high quality render-ready content at your fingertips. ConDoc Tools optimises Layout and SketchUp for architects and interior designers. Instant Roof Nui does exactly what it says on the tin, creating amazing roofs in no time. The 3D Tree Maker is another popular choice for SketchUp architecture, as is Pushline, a super-simple and fast way to click an edge, or preselect and click on it, then push it.

SketchUp 3D Warehouse

The SketchUp 3D Warehouse is a vast library of custom-made third-party extensions created to optimise your SketchUp workflow. It is also packed with handy resources to support architectural design excellence, stashed in the ‘architecture’ category, along with building products and much more. You’ll find a collection of excellent 3D components relevant to architectural design including traditional windows and casements, full architectural design examples, and the same for interior designs.

This is your SketchUp architecture go-to workflow optimisation resource. It contains more than 600 extensions, with a team of developers working full-time to hack your workflow. You can tap into industry and workflow categories. Simply choose a pain point in your modelling or choose your sector to see a list of exciting extensions to ease your workflow. Every extension integrates smoothly and directly into SketchUp Pro. This is how you create beautiful photorealistic renderings in seconds, bringing your work to life in fresh new ways. You can model anything in a few clicks to level up your drawing skills. There are even dozens of extensions to prepare your model for 3D printing, designing and cleaning up solid shapes with ease and flair. That’s the way to do it!

Rendering in SketchUp

Rendering in SketchUp is a dream. As a SketchUp architect all you do is make your way over to the extensions warehouse to discover a wide variety of excellent rendering tools for SketchUp, including the top notch choices V-Ray, SU Podium, and Thea Render. You can integrate useful software into SketchUp simply via the Extension Warehouse then make stunning, fantastically realistic renders.

Combining rendering software with SketchUp is often all you need to deliver outstanding professional results. You can imagine how creating a hyper-real image of your design for clients, colleagues and other stakeholders to examine makes life so much easier. People can see exactly what you intend from the design. The lighting is completely realistic, whether it’s internal lighting or light from the weather outdoors. In a nutshell, rendering makes architectural designs easier to understand, more attractive, more realistic and easier to digest.

3D Architectural Walkthroughs in SketchUp

An architectural walk-through is like magic, an exceptional way to reveal your design in all its realistic glory. So what is a 3D architectural walkthrough? It’s an interactive 3D virtual tour of a property’s interior and exterior, and it’s a remarkably powerful visual tool. This is where SketchUp architecture really comes into its own, and the impact is quite something. All you do is use Sketchup along with rendering extensions from the Extension Warehouse to enable the creation of engaging 3D walkthroughs. As you can imagine they really bring architectural designs to sizzling life – enabling architects like you to showcase their work professionally. When impressive presentations are the name of the game, it’s a winner.

And the tech? Architectural walkthroughs are animations designed to reveal 2D designs, drawings and plans in 3D. It’s a proven way to help architects realise ideas.

Accurate SketchUp Measurement Tools

Obviously, accuracy is key to your SketchUp architect workflow and your success in architectural design. It’s good to know that Sketchup not only aces 3D design, you can also easily convert your work into 2D plans and elevations. There are loads of great measurement tools in SketchUp to ensure 2D drawings and plans are always accurate. And the software lets you change your designs dynamically whenever you like, as often as you want.

We recommend you always use the Measurement Tools provided in Sketchup, simply because the biggest challenge for architects using SketchUp is making sure you align models on the right plane. You have to think about the X, Y, and Z axes at every stage to avoid losing the plot! A change to the model on one axis will cause changes on the others, and the same goes when you want to move the model around. This leads to your lines failing to match up when you switch views.

Your best tools in this situation are the Tape Measure and Protractor tools. They mark out the three main axes so they’re always visible. And that means you can see exactly how your changes affect the overall model. Neat.

Now you know how SketchUp architecture will help you create ‘amazing’ every day. Have you tried it yet? Why not give it a free trial?

Protected: Release Note: SketchUp for iPad v6.1.0

Posted on September 15, 2018July 14, 2023 by Charlotte Lee

A Look at SU Podium

Posted on April 19, 2017January 29, 2024 by Kyle Wilkins

SU Podium V2.5 Plus is a photorealistic rendering plug-in for SketchUp developed to turn your SketchUp model into a photo-real image with realistic lighting, material properties, reflection, and refraction.

SU Podium exists so that anyone can create beautiful, photo-realistic renders from their SketchUp models without the pain and frustration of learning a complex program. SU Podium runs completely inside SketchUp from start to finish, and makes use of the SketchUp features that you’re already familiar with to achieve impressive results. SU Podium is intuitive to SketchUp users, easy to grasp for beginners, and the simple interface and versatile presets cut the learning curve to minutes instead of months.

Take a look at some of this fantastic SketchUp model, rendered with SU Podium (credit to Bernardo Arellano Dávalos)

Take a look at the SU Podium galleries here:
SU Podium User Gallery and Panorama User Gallery

Realistic Materials: An essential part of creating SketchUp models is applying textures to faces. SU Podium can turn these plain textures into very realistic materials, quickly and intuitively via the Podium material user interface. Reflections, refractions, bump maps and other advanced properties can be applied to a specific SketchUp materials. When rendered these properties bring the model to life by reflecting light and the environment. You can use standard SketchUp materials as well higher resolution textures from a variety of libraries as well as Podium Browser content.

Lighting up exteriors and interiors: SU Podium V2.5 has two types of natural lights. Sky and Sun. These are both “exterior” lights but will have a lot of effect on interior renderings if you are using windows and openings to the exterior.

Sky Light: – Sky light is an ambient light source applied evenly to the entire SketchUp background sky.
Sun Light – Sun light is a directional light source that uses SketchUp’s sky and shadow settings (SketchUp shadows must be turned on). The sun’s brightness, exposure, and shadow direction can easily be controlled by changing SketchUp’s time of day and year in the Shadows dialog. When sun light is on, you can use Podium’s Physical Sky to create a realistic sky background with atmospheric qualities such as turbidity and realistic tonemapping.

Find out more:Get in touch with Elmtec, SketchUp’s distribution partner in the UK. Drop us an email at sales@elmtec.co.uk

Tag: plug-ins. su podium