NXtRender Feature Comparison

• See: Specular Reflection

• See: Animation

Arroway has made about 100 low-res versions of their textures available to IRender nXt users.

• See: Arroway Textures

• See: Reflection

It has 3 main uses and benefits.

1. Large Models - Models which are too large to render directly from SketchUp can be rendered in batch mode.
2. Animation - Batch mode is used for animation, because animations need to load and reload the model when there are layer changes, and because animations typically take a long time to render.
3. Network Rendering - The entire folder containing the rendering information and files can be accessed across a network, or copied to a thumb drive or another machine and used to render the model.

• See: Batch Rendering

• See: Caustics

• See: Color Render Mode

The left half image on the left has a normal (non-Daylight Portal) opening. It took hundreds of passes to resolve properly. The right half has openings marked as Daylight Portals. The lighting looked this good after just a few passes.

In IRender nXt, Daylight is a set using the Material Wizard .

• See: Daylight Portals

Depth Blur can also be defined as a Post-Processing technique in the nXt Image Editor .

• See: Depth of Field and ' Depth Blur

• See: Ground Cover

In IRender nXt edge highlighting is turned on in the Advanced Settings dialog.

• See: Edge Highlighting

This creates a realistic lighting effect which improves with each successive rendering pass. Indirect should be used with most interiors scenes to soften the lighting effects.

• See: Indirect Lighting
• See: Cove Lighting

(Laptop seats are available for nXtRender, and other Render Plus products at an additional charge)

• See: Laptop_License

By assigning channels to sun, sky, and groups of lights, you can quickly adjust the intensity of each channel with a slidebar and immediately see the effect on the final rendering.

This will save time both in determining the relative intensities to use for light sources and in fine tuning the final image before publication.

• See: Lighting Channels

• See: Material Wizard

[[Real Time Haze], Depth Blur , Lighting Channels , save as Piranesi format, save as HDRi.

• See: Object Properties

Create SketchUp materials which automatically render as IRender nXt materials.

• See: IRender nXt Tutorial - Materials

Create SketchUp components to represent IRender nXt plants. These are then automatically rendered as 'fractal' plants.

• See: IRender nXt Plants

Object Properties can be used to make any face or object act as a light source, or to set other special properties.

• See: Object Properties

• See: Procedural Bump Maps

These effects can be modified after the rendering is completed.

• See: Real Time Haze

Double click on a material in the rendered image to edit the material.

Reload modified materials back into SketchUp model.

• See: Rendering Editor

• See: RPC Objects

• See: Section Planes

• See: Watermarks

• See: Antialiasing

This is not quite correct, but can often create an interesting 3D effect.

• nXtRender provides a check box to turn Auto Bump on and off.
• IRender nXt allows fine tuning of bump and color intensities.
• See: Bump Maps

• See: Background Image

This allows you to make changes to the SketchUp model wihtout having to wait for the rendering to complete

• See also: Batch Rendering

• See: Foreground Image

• See: Fully integrated into SketchUp

HDRi (high dynamic range imaging)is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRi is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

IRender nXt offers support for HDRi Skies - used as visible skies, as sky reflections and for illumination from the Sky.

• See: HDRi Skies

• See: IRender Ready Collection

In addition there are Lamp Wizards to create new lamps and lamp components.

• See: IRender Tutorial - Lights

The Presets lets you choose predefined settings for the most common lighting situations.

There are a lot of settings to create special lighting effects. The presets make it easier to get a good rendering without having to make all the setting manually.

• See: IRender Presets Tab

IRender nXt sets multiple settings for a single material - such a setting both transparency and index of refraction for glass materials.

• See: Material Wizard

Create a full 360 degree panoramic image which can be turned into a movie and embedded in a web page.

A Panoramic image is created by rotation the camera while rendering to create a full 360 x 360 degree image.

• See: Panoramic Views

Make any SketchUp material reflective with right click edit.

• See: Rendering Tip - Use reflective surfaces
• See: Specular Reflection

• See: Rendering

when the tree is rendered.

• See: RpTreeMaker

For objects which you want to appear bright, but which don't need to illuminate other objects, this is much faster than making lights out of them.

• See: Self Glow

• See: SketchUp Components

You can set reflection and other rendering properties by right clicking on a face containing a materiel to set its rendering properties.

• See: SketchUp Materials

plus Advanced Sun Settings from AccuRender dialogs.

• See: Sun and Shadows

• See: Translucency

• See: Transparency

Perspective views set in SketchUp are retained while rendering.

• See: Perspective

• See: Visible Light Paths