ICE Edge has launched the first ever ICEvision competition right here on Sketchucation! They have worked closely with their friends at 3Dconnexion who have very kindly supplied some fantastic prizes for you to literally get your hands on. Grand prize: 3DConnexion SpacePilot™ PRO mouse ($409.99 USD value) & an additional three-month ICEvision subscription with some fantastic 2nd, 3rd and bonus prizes all supplied from 3Dconnexion & ICEvision!

For details of the competition, please, visit the competition site “ICEvision“, to enter the competition, register here with the promo code SKV856.

The Daily CatchUp was happy to announce the release of the new “Twilight Render” last week. Ever since it has become a success as we can tell even by forum members never really thinking about photo-realistic rendering joining the growing user base of the new product. Now we have asked Shane Fletcher (aka “Fletch”), member of the development team about some details.

TDC: Why another render engine for SketchUp? What’s special about Twilight Render?

Shane: Twilight was designed by a professional CG artist and an Architect/Designer and professional SketchUp user. So it was designed specifically for the Architectural Designer using SketchUp. Architects don’t have a lot of time for muddling through complicated rendering programs. But they want and need high quality renderings. They want something quick, simple, flexible, and powerful.

Making good materials have traditionally been the stumbling block for most architects who want to show their projects in 3D. Twilight employs “Material Templates” to add special properties to the materials you have already painted into your model. This gives the designer the power to create physically accurate, high-quality materials with only a couple of clicks. They are extremely flexible also, allowing both advanced and beginning users to create nearly anything they need.

As you can see from the images, Twilight is very high quality with multiple rendering methods, biased and unbiased. This gives the designer the freedom to choose speed for a prelim or animation using biased rendering, or accuracy using unbiased rendering.

TDC: Why should people want to buy Twilight if they already purchased other rendering solutions for SketchUp?

Shane: Twilight Render is easily affordable for almost anyone and is a nice tool in your pocket. Perhaps they are looking for something which is light weight but flexible and powerful. You can learn the basics of Twilight in less than 30 minutes and start rendering nice images right away.  It has multiple render methods, single-click clay rendering, single-click alpha mask rendering, depth rendering, and more.

As a professional visualization specialist myself, just being able to select an object and render an alpha mask for it in a few seconds is worth the price of admission. Who hasn’t wanted that?

TDC: Your website says that Twilight is using Kerkythea as its render engine. What is your affiliation with Kerkythea?

Shane: We have worked closely with the Kerkythea developer to design Twilight to be a product that will serve architects, designers, students, and hobbyists in a powerful way. They have actively supported our efforts with Twilight. Other than that, we are independent from the developer of Kerkythea from a business point of view. We do, however provide a .xml exporter for Kerkythea users.

TDC: What else makes Twilight worth a look?

Shane:

• It’s an incredible buy for the price… there’s no arguing that.
• You can control all lights in the scene from a single easy master control panel.
• It has the ability to render your scene as a spherical image. No need to render 6 images and piece them together in a third party app, simply choose the spherical camera, and hit render.
• Another cool thing is that you can render edges of faces for artistic effect.
• Render your animations made using SketchyPhysics and Proper Animation ruby scripts.
• One special thing we have is that when you load a Photometric (IES) file into a light, the shape of the light changes immediately to assist in aiming the light properly. This was always a pain in programs we have used before. Now it’s fun.
• Interactive exposure adjustment (Tone Mapping) during or after rendering.
• Multithreading on as many threads as you can give it. On a machine with 8 processors, rendering is truly a joy. We’ve seen other render engines that want people to pay more to be able to use more than 2 processors… makes no sense to me.

TDC: There is no Mac version yet although obviously “it’s coming soon” (one or two months according to forum rumours). Some Mac users are curious if they purchase a Windows license for Twilight Render for the introductory price now (or until September 24 actually), will they be able to transfer their license to the Mac?

Shane: Absolutely – we certainly are glad to see the interest in Twilight of so many talented and creative Mac users, and would not want to disappoint them. We can not guarantee a time frame, but can say with all the kids going back to school with new Macs, it is a high priority for us.

TDC: Finally, for those who frequent the Twilight Forums less; what new features are you planning to implement in a future, new version? I know it’s too early to speak about it as version 1 has just been released but still…

Shane: Sure, we know that Net Rendering is a very high priority for us. We already have a beta with a working tool for creating proxy objects (taking a high-polygon model, and only displaying a low poly temporary model in SketchUp, but rendering the high-polygon model instead.) We also have some ideas for improving the Light Editor to make it even more user friendly. We have begun testing on rendering SketchUp section cuts as well which is very exciting. Users have requested the ability to change render settings themselves more easily, as well as to create their own material template presets and libraries, so we will of course touch on this as well. Finally, there’s an idea for user-made Environment Presets, so that one can set up a variety of Sun and Sky options, then save and restore them quickly.

Thank you very much for your interest in Twilight Render, and we wish to say how much we appreciate all the great staff and contributors at SketchUcation, their talent and generosity is an inspiration to us.

TDC: And we thank you, Fletch, for taking your time for this interview in the midst of all the hard work I can imagine you guys have at the moment.

Twilight Render is a fully integrated rendering solution for Google SketchUp.

With Twilight, it’s now possible to render photo-realistic images inside Google SketchUp!  Render with biased and unbiased methods on an unlimited number of processors.  And while Twilight is rendering in the background, continue working in and saving your SketchUp models.

Twilight offers physically accurate materials, photometric (IES) lights, image based (HDR) lighting, a long list of easy-to-choose optimized preset render settings, animation with SketchyPhysics and ProperAnimation, and more!

Read more on the Twighlight Render website and forum.

The voting for the bridge modelling challenge is now up, i recomend having a look if for no other reason than to marvel at the quality of the models: a remarkably high standard given the time constraint.

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=291&t=21054

Become a Beta Tester! ASGVIS are getting closer to the final release of V-Ray for SketchUp for Mac OS X (hooray!). But before they release, they need your help! If you’re a  Mac user and would like to test the work-in-progress release of V-Ray for Mac OS X, please fill out the form located here.

Read more.

“When Google Labs released its experimental browser toolbar with its My Location finder for Internet Explorer last week, we wondered why it wasn’t available for Firefox. Now we know. Instead of being added on through a toolbar or extension, it was intended to be built in. So, on Thursday, Mozilla turned on a new feature for Firefox 3.5 beta 4, and for Fennec, the code name for the mobile version of Firefox: Google’s geolocation service. Like the toolbar with My Location, Mozilla’s opt-in engine will use your position to return more focused search results across the Web…”

Read more.

Concerned about your privacy? See how to hack it in your browser here.