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Rendering Sketchup with Indigo

Indigo has released a new version 3 (3.0.14) of their excellent rendering software that can be used along with Google Sketchup 8. This combination of software the  rendering somewhat realistic 3d graphics. Indigo provides a Sketchup Exporter which enables quick access to the rendering interface loading your Sketchup file as an .igs render file.

Cubes created in Sketchup 8.0 and rendered in Indigo 3

Indigo also provides the capability to setup other machines on your network as rendering slaves. I did discover that you cannot mix Windows and Apple machines together for network rendering. But, I did setup two Macbook Pros to render the above image in almost half the time. Rendering the cube file at that level took one hour but once I implemented the rendering slave it took about 35 minutes to achieve the same level of quality. I could have let it render longer but wanted to make a quick comparison. Indigo will actually keep rendering until you tell it to stop.

Indigo provides a 30 day demo that will render large files. After the 30 days, it only allows a certain maximum file size of around 720K.  Great for playing around but if you are going to do commercial work you will need to plunk down the $835.00  plus $270.00 for each slave rendering node. It is the only rendering application that I have found that runs well on Mac while integrating with Sketchup.

More of my renders to appear on this blog.