Worth checking out if you haven't already.

There will be a direct skp file import plugin... but it'll cost extra ($99)

http://www.luxology.com/

-to

I rendered a couple short animations and they looked great. If you want animation, then you should look into Modo.

jake (or anybody who are familiar enough with the prog), can you give us a quick impression of yours on this prog?
I looked at their site but it is already huge... cannot find anything there.

Is it...
really fast as they claim?
accurate on GI?
accurate with IES interior lighting?
easy with rendering settings?

jake (or anybody who are familiar enough with the prog), can you give us a quick impression of yours on this prog?
I looked at their site but it is already huge... cannot find anything there.

Is it...
really fast as they claim?
accurate on GI?
accurate with IES interior lighting?
easy with rendering settings?

Takesh,

I have been using it for a year and I can tell you that is an excellent program. I use it strictly for rendering and now animation.

It really IS fast. Especially for exteriors. I generally use and HDRI and a directional for sun and with average polygon count you can get a render at 2400 x 1500 in around 8 minutes. Really is that fast. Now, the quality is excellent, but it probably doesn't quite have the quality of Maxwell, but you would have to wait 6 hours for a Maxwell render to clear up. SO , in that respect I would say GI is very good.

I have not used IES lights yet , although I downloaded a few from GE and will give them a run this weekend. There is a good IES video demo in the render section of Luxology.tv at the Luxology site. They look good, but as far as accuracy . . . I don't know.

http://www.luxology.com/training/?mode=Category&id=5



Rendering settings are quite easy. All quite logical. Same with the shader tree for materials.

I export .objs from SketchUp and import into Modo. Works well as does .3ds and .fbx. As Toaster_oven said, Modo will soon be releasing a plugin for native Rhino and Sketchup files for an extra 99 bucks.

It really IS fast. Especially for exteriors. I generally use and HDRI and a directional for sun and with average polygon count you can get a render at 2400 x 1500 in around 8 minutes. Really is that fast.
That's much faster than the biased renderer I use...:eek:
The problem will be the pricing... and they SELL tutorial videos??? That's mean!

welcome back jake!!!
how does it compare in relationship with Artlantis when it comes to speed?

welcome back jake!!!
how does it compare in relationship with Artlantis when it comes to speed?

Artlantis is probably as quick or quicker, but nowhere near the quality in my opinion.

JAKE!!!!!!!!
YOUR BACK!!!!!


How does the SU importer work? With ver. 202 I tried importing my SU models as obj and it took for ever.....has thise been solved?

The sculpting and painting enviroment looks promising, don't know how it stands to Zbrush

The sculpting and painting enviroment looks promising, don't know how it stands to Zbrush

I haven't used Modo yet, but people say that the painting environment is the most intuitive of them all (compared to Zbrush and the C4D 'body paint' plug)....being able to just pick a brush and paint on the object, just like you would expect it to work.

JAKE!!!!!!!!
YOUR BACK!!!!!


How does the SU importer work? With ver. 202 I tried importing my SU models as obj and it took for ever.....has thise been solved?

Hey ypnos1. The sketchup import plugin is not out yet. The obj. import can be a bit tedious. I always break the model down into logical pieces and import a piece at a time. This works a little faster and also help make changes quicker if project design changes . . . which it does quite often.:bang head

I also just tried the setting up network rendering. Seems to hook up pretty easy, but I don't see any time savings so far. Maybe about 1 minute on a 14 minute render of a still.

There is a problem with rendering animation. I guess the irradiance caching is repeated on each slave, so there is a lot or redundancy and if your main render machine is faster than the slaves then it sits around waiting for the slaves to catch up.

There is a fellow working on a script that will distribute individual frames to each slave so this will be avoided. Each slave will work at it's own pace then, hopefully speeding up the process for animation.

It's all a work in progress I guess. Still better than anything I've used so far.