Adjusting the level of light and dark makes a big difference. The shadows are set according to the time of year and day set in SketchUp’s Shadows window. It’s really fun to watch – here’s how things looked after 30 seconds and the first pass through:īut the rendering was complete after only about three minutes, with no effort by me whatsoever. The rendering starts when you click the green “Play” icon at the top left. For a first try I went with option number 7: “High+” which sounds better than just plain “High.” You can also choose from the scenes and layers available in your SketchUp model. At the top of the render window you can set the image size, and choose from several preset rendering settings. So I went straight to Extensions / Twilight Render / Render.

All of these are worth looking into, but I wanted quick and easy. When you choose Extensions / Twilight Render, there are several options, including lights, materials, environments, etc. Here’s the SketchUp cafe model I’m testing this on (look familiar?): Once installed, Twilight Render is found in the Extensions menu. ( See our post on SketchUcation, which explains how to install an RBZ.) On the Mac, you get an RBZ file, which you have to install via SketchUp. On the PC, the downloaded EXE file installs directly into SketchUp as an extension. This week I thought I’d try out Twilight Render‘s free version, called Hobby. And Kerkythea is a popular free engine – also not supported but it still works. But that app hasn’t been supported since SketchUp 2015. Without getting too much into material mapping, shadows, defining lights, etc.įor many of the renderings on this blog, I used to use Visualizer – it was fast and easy. Hey, did you know that this our 100th post?

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