I understand that podium is integrated to SU and easier to use, but the capabilities are nearly uncompareble to Kerkythea.

pipemaker

I think there are only 3 not free renderers to think about... Maxwell,Fryrender,Vray...The first two are a new generation,they are called unbiased... Everything else, is just getting old... This is the only choise - I think- if you want to invest money to get realistic images.

Hi Olda,

> What the MOI is and what it wants to be.

Well I guess I'd call MoI a design tool.

Currently the focus is just on the modeling part of creating a design - drawing shapes and creating the form of your model.

The emphasis is on making it really quick and easy to create simple models.

In the future I expect to generally add more stuff that designers typically want to do during the process of creating their stuff, like putting in some annotations like dimension lines, doing renderings to help communicate your design to other people, etc... But probably in the closer term the focus will still be on adding more modeling stuff for a little while yet.

I do not have a 100% completely fixed plan in place for future development, I have a lot of ideas on stuff that I'd like to do, but priorities can shift around depending on user feedback.

Do you have ideas on stuff that you'd like to see in MoI in future versions?

- Michael

off-topic, but - I don't think unbiased rendering is the future for everybody. There is another alternative such as Modo which is a hybrid of unbiased and biased engine. I considered buying Fry, but just can't wait for those long render times. Yesterday i had to render 5 different color variations of a beaded necklace for a client. It had over 1,400 glass beads (mesh instances) all with refraction plus a bunch of metal components with colored enamel inlays. Modo rendered an 800 x 640 image in less than 10 minutes with 2 GI bounces and using blurry reflections on the ground plane and all of the metal shaders. In less than one hour i rendered out all 5 color variations... How many days would this take with Fry or (even worse) with Maxwell?

jonah

There is also Indigo http://www2.indigorenderer.com/joomla/

with very good exporter for SketchUp (and free).

News about future development of Su exporter

http://www.indigorenderer.com/joomla/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2686

And Rhino4 established very good relationship (import-export) with SketchUp.

If it is not proprietary,
I can render your image for your in Indigo - but I can tell you that 10 minutes isn't enough time for a clean render. A few hours probably.

If what you are using is acceptable, than stick with it!

I personally love the realism and feeling of scenes done in Maxwell, or Fry, or Indigo.

thanks for the offer, but everything i do at work is proprietary. This time was client's design... i love the realism of unbiased engines too. But it has no practical use for me if it takes a few hours. 30 minutes is usually about as long as i can wait, but only if I need single color variation of a design. Unfortunatley for me, speed is critical...

jonah

Hi Jonah, have you looked any more at Hypershot by any chance?

- Michael

Hi Michael. Hypershot is interesting. But it doesn't have the full material capability of other modern engines. And i think soon it will not be alone in the real-time market. Fryrender already has it's own real-time engine coming soon, or so Feversoft has been saying for a long time now !!! :)

We will see how this real-time market develops. Right now, i don't want to jump on the first thing available.

jonah