Whether you are a professional architect or an amateur organic modeler? you will always want to see your 3D model in a lifelike render. And there are few renderers in the market right now better than Indigo for SketchUp. For a nice, photorealistic render of your model with life-like shadow and light effects, consider Indigo today.
When it comes to rendering speed and quality, there are few contenders on the rendering 3D models field, that comes close to Indigo. Combine this awesome engine with the adaptability of a SketchUp extension, and you get what they call Indigo for SketchUp.
Salient Features of Indigo
Indigo for SketchUp has many astounding features, but the highlights among them have to be the following:
Photorealism on Steroids
Breeze through the creation process with Indigo’s material palette and light objects. Adding their displacement maps to the model’s surfaces imbues them with reality? with the added benefit of looking pretty.
Incredible levels of detail go through the roof with added realism through the patent “unbiased rendering” feature of the software. The physical GPU-based rendering engine isn’t bottlenecked by the CPU and thus it can do its work much faster than most of its competitors.
Realistic assumptions of camera aperture positioning and smart white balance, your render outputs are set to stun as you point them towards the client and shoot.
Indigo Scattering
One of the best features of Indigo is its internal scattering algorithm. This is mostly seen in-effect when you are rendering vegetation? the incredible level of detail on trees, bushes, and grass that this engine creates is simply just unbelievable.
What’s more, it is quite customizable. There are a bunch of scattering presents given already ? and we see why anyone would be tempted to use only them. However, if you want to get that just perfect look, you can manually adjust the settings on this baby as well. You can also save your perfect scattering setting as a preset to use many times later.
But that’s not the end! Indigo for SketchUp also supports Skatter for SketchUp, which will let you choose the brushes and related advanced variables. You can use this to customize and realize your scenes even better ? with very little additional memory usage too!
Light Layers
Indigo for SketchUp supports creating “light layers”, which are virtual layers on a scene for different kinds of lighting and settings. Using this, you can easily and quickly switch between day and night, among different lights setup, and superimpose one type of lighting upon another to see the end effect ? just because you can.
Material Database
The Indigo for SketchUp extension has a built-in browser! Using it, you can view and download hundreds of simple and complex materials to paint your surfaces. There are hundreds of materials available at Indigo’s material database ? over 600 and growing, in fact! And what’s more you can edit them too.
Creative lighting
Soup up your render to the maximum level of cool using the following premium lighting effects of Indigo for SketchUp:
- Area lighting
- Mesh lighting
- Sun lighting
- Sky lighting
- HDRi effects
- IES light sources
- … and more!
Section plane render
What about seeing the insides from the outsides? With Indigo for SketchUp’s section plane renders, you can do that too! Render up the insides of your model using a section cut from SketchUp in perfect detail? while keeping in mind the natural building openings (or not!).
Wrap-up
Converting an existing scene to be “Indigo ready” is a matter of minutes. The great lighting system of Indigo does the magic more or less automatically when you use a physically correct environment.
Using Indigo for SketchUp can create great images that look so real that your friends and clients won’t be able to tell if it’s a photo or a computer-generated image.
