Spotlight: Al Hart of RenderPlus' nXtRender

TDC: Al, you have been involved in 3D CAD for a long time. How did you get started.

Al Hart: Yes Coen. I guess I am one of the “Cad Pioneers” although I am not as famous as Pat Hanratty and the others. We founded Sigma Design in 1978 which wrote ARRIS – the first micro-processor based, 3D CAD System. ARRIS is still being used and we still make new versions for the dedicated customer base. In 1987 we spun off a new company – now called Render Plus – writing add-on applications for ARRIS.

We created more than 20 add-on applications for ARRIS CAD, and then in the 1990s we started creating stand-alone applications – which didn’t require a CAD system. The most popular of these were Site Designer by LANDCADD, Giza Office Furniture for Facet, and Planix Exterior Designer for Softdesk. We developed our own 3D CAD system to support these applications.

TDC: Interesting… But, how did you get involved with SketchUp

Al Hart: We wrote a SketchUp import/export routine for ARRIS CAD in 2003 after we discovered that about ½ of the architects using ARRIS also used SketchUp. SketchUp made a presentation at the ARRIS users group meetings in 2004 and 2005. We were quite impressed with SketchUp and decided to drop our own 3D Cad system, and write add-on applications for SketchUp instead.

The first was RPS 3D PDF which creates interactive, 3D, PDF files for use with Adobe Reader. Then we created a rendering interface, based on the McNeel and Associates rendering engine AccuRender. These proved to be quite popular add-ons for SketchUp.

TDC: What kind of applications are you writing?

Al Hart: We realized that SketchUp was a great system for creating 3D objects, massing studies, etc. But that it was weaker in some basic CAD capabilities – such as placing pre-made components into a space and manipulating them, or drawing 2D Construction documents. We decided to create some tools to enhance SketchUp in this area. The impression we get from the SketchUp team is that they would prefer to develop capabilities – such as Dynamic Components – but let the third party world create scripts for specific uses of these tools. So our primary business is to develop applications to enhance SketchUp.

TDC: What is the difference between an application and a script?

Al Hart: SketchUp provides a fairly powerful scripting language – Ruby – which can be used to created scripts to do almost anything in SketchUp. Quite a few ruby developers create these scripts and them make hem available – either free or at a small cost – to the SketchUp community. We use quite a few of these ourselves – such as FlightPath from Smustard. Often if you have a specific need you can find a script someone has written for it.

An add-on application is larger than just a script. Our applications combine toolbars, dialog boxes, right click functions, ruby code and C++ code to provide a complete user interface for tackling tasks.

Of course, there is a lot of overlap between scripts and applications. One difference is that a script can often be download, placed in the SketchUp Plug-ins folder and used immediately. An application, because it contains a variety of items – images, ruby scripts, dialog boxes and DLLs usually needs to be installed, rather than just unzipped into the Plug-ins folder.

TDC: OK – enough history. I wanted to ask you about your latest product.

Al Hart: That would be nXtRender – our new, low-cost rendering engine for SketchUp…

TDC: But Wait. When I look at the SketchUcation  Render application Home pages thread I see more than 30 renderers for SketchUp. Why do we need another one?

Al Hart: Well, there are indeed a lot of them. But there are only a few which are integrated into SketchUp – meaning that the rendering settings, lights and materials are stored in the SketchUp model – and there are only a few written by a team like ours which is dedicated to making the process as logical and easy as possible.

TDC: OK. I can see that point. But one of the 30 or more products is your own product, IRender, which uses the same engine as nXtRender.

Al Hart: IRender nXt is very powerful and contains all the high-end features which serious rendering folks like to use. But as we added each new feature, it made the use interface more an more complex. For instance, SketchUp only has one transparency setting – amount of transparency. IRender has 9 – including such things as refraction and caustics. This lets the users get exactly the effect desired. But for the novice, it can be very confusing setting 9 parameters and re-rendering to get the perfect effect.

We wanted to make a renderer which made very good renderings, with very few options for the user to set. So we created a new interface to the nXt rendering engine – nXtRender, made it easy to use and set a very low price.

TDC: Can you create good renderings without a lot of settings?

Al Hart: One thing we did was to create a set of default rendering environments – to match typical modeling environments. The user selects one of these environments, and then clicks the render button and gets a very good rendering with no additional setting being required.

Here is an example of a rendering created from a 3D warehouse using the High Dynamic Lighting preset. The High-Dynamic – Studio lighting effect filters the sun through a forest to create subtle lighting patterns.

No changes were made to the SketchUp model. Just click high dynamic and click render. Colors, transparency and materials are all read from the SketchUp model.

TDC: But what if I want to make better renderings.

Al Hart: Usually the two things you want to add to a model, which aren’t already contained in the SketchUp model and materials are lighting and reflection. We have a simple right-click dialog which sets these properties for a material.

You right click on surface containing a material (you do not even have to open a group or component for edit – we figure out which material you want), and set the sliders for reflection and/or Illumination (usually not both) and you can easily add the items which make a good rendering. The changes are automatically applied to all surfaces using the same material.

Here is another 3D Warehouse model. We placed it in a room, added some lights to the ceiling and added reflection to most of the materials, clicked the render button and got a great rendering.

The highlighting (bright white reflections) on the fixtures and bowls and the subtle lighting effects from the ceiling lights create an excellent rendering with a minimum amount of effort.

TDC: How long does it take to create these renderings?

Al Hart: That’s always a tricky question. With nXtRender you can let it render as long as you like – each rendering pass improves the rendering by sampling the lights and reflections better and better. The rendering of the bathroom took less than a minute.

But more geometry, larger screen sizes, more lights, etc., create models which take longer to render.

No matter how much we improve the speed of the renderer it is never fast enough. Most users render at a small size until they like the results, and then let the final rendering “cook” overnight.

TDC: Sounds good. Is there anything more you would like to add?

Al Hart: In addition to making a light by setting illumination for a material we also provide light bulbs and spot light bulbs which you can include in a light fixture.

However, that is just about it for features – we wanted to keep the feature list very small to make nXtRender very easy to use. And we wanted to keep the price low to make it an easy purchase decision. We hope this till be a very good addition to the list of renderers for SketchUp, we hope it gets added to the list of available renderers on the SketchUcation forum, and we hope your readers will give it a try.

To read more or download a trial version (with full capabilities for 30-days), visit: nXtRender.

TDC: Thank you for doing this interview with us Al.

Al Hart: Thanks for having us.

Short URL: http://news.sketchucation.com/?p=1507