IRender nXt slower than AccuRender for AutoCAD?

Our office is making a general shift from modelling & rendering in 3D AutoCAD toward Sketchup due to the softwares intuitive nature.

The main problem is the time it takes to complete a render. With AutoCAD we are using Accurender for our renderings, which produce renders in very quick time. We are finding that the irendernxt add on to sketchup is taking too long by comparison.

An Accurender render might take 5 minutes, whereas an irender nxt render would take over an hour for the same quality (pixel ratio) image.

Is there any way of speeding up the render? Are we missing something? We aren’t sure if it is the sketchup software which is the limiting factor here?

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on May 30, 2011 at 8:31pm

I presume you are using AccuRender nXt for SketchUp. If you are using AccuRender 3 or AccuRender 4 for SketchUp that could explain the difference as well.

We are using the same software (AccuRender nXt) so the render times should be similar. It takes longer to extract data from SketchUp and to start the rendering, but once the rendering get started the rendering times should be the same. There must be something else different.

Can you create a test model in DWG and a similar model in SketchUp and send them both to us, along with your rendering times, so we can see what the difference is.

Hopefully it is some setting we can fix, or a difference in the complexity of the geometry.

If you can send us something we can test with. (Hopefully a small model)

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on May 30, 2011 at 8:33pm

Another idea is the 2-sided triangle setting.

For SketchUp models we always process both sides of a triangle if both sides have materials. (Usually SketchUp users do not place materials on the inside of a triangle if is is always invisible)

However, the DWG to SKP importer may place materials on both sides of every triangle just to be safe.

Try turning it off to see if that helps.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on May 31, 2011 at 1:11pm

We haven't received a model from you yet, but we did take a DWG file we were working on in AutoCAD, rendered it in AutoCAD, saved it to SketchUp and rendered it in SketchUp.

The SketchUp initiated rendering was faster then the AutoCAD one. But we will know more if we can get a test model.