What are people looking for when they choose a rendering package for SketchUp.

We are working on improving our write-up on the SketchUp Plugins page, and improving the first look people get when they link to us from that page. (Currently our Home Page)

Most people learn about IRender nXt from the SketchUp Plugins page because that is the first place they go to look for rendeirng packages for SketchUp.

If you would, take a minute to let us know a few things.

What prompted you to look for a rendering package in the first place.
What kind of things were you looking for.
Did you look a lot of renderers or just one or two.
If just one or two, what was important in deciding which ones to look at. (e.g. did you even know what HDRi, or IES meant?)
After you click and go to our Home Page, what is important to make you decide to look further. (images, features, download links, etc.)

We would love to hear any advice you have to offer.

You can respond here if you like, or just send an email to al.hart@renderplus.com

Thank,

Al and Rich.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ben1517 on October 28, 2011 at 3:22am

1. better more realistic images for inclusion in photo montages

2. Ease of simplicity of use and quick learning curve, intuative, not loads of settings to figure out, quick results.

3/4 Tried podium didn't get results very quickly eventually dumped it

5 Can't remember but tried the trial version and was impressed with 1 and 2 above

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Permalink Reply by Alain Bonnefoy on October 30, 2011 at 5:55am

I think displaying some nice rendered scenes as you do on your home page or gallery is important but often, we are immediately frustated by our results because even if iRender is certainly the most easy to take in hand, some considerations about texture quality and lightning widely affect the result.

So, some scenes with a clear explanation on the choosen parameters is always widely helpfull.

After a general problem is how to choose the different version of a "same tool". I don't want to give names but some web sites present not far from 10 similar tools and it's nightmare to make our choice.

Here, we have chance to have a comparison chart, it's not always the case and more important, each feature is explained and illustrated. It's a very good point.

Try version is always very important and I think one of the best feature of iRender is the "Help Desk"!

About the question 4, I didn't know about HDRi before using iRender. In fact, I just try few other rendering tools and choosed this one which appears to be the simplest one (it's always difficult to give a simple tool with lot of features in the same time because rendering is not an easy thing). But HDRi is still frustrating to me because I think the best way to use it is in cylindrical or spherical projection which needs very very high resolution images, hard to find or expensive. Clearly, the supplied ones are ,from my point of view, almost impossible to use. Maybe I'm wrong.

Alain