Every so often there is a game changing bit of software for education. Usually it is the result of a market maturing, Education gets the benefit some years after the technology is used in industry and usually by then the wrinkles have been ironed out. We can see this benefit to education in the plethora of PIC electronic systems, all based on pretty much the same programming kernel and chip (whatever some may argue) and offering near identical levels of performance. Sketchup has been my choice for the last five years whenever a new idea pops in my head and I wish to model it, but the flaw has been the possibility of outputting truly stunning images to compete with the industry best. Certainly Pro Desktops b
uilt in renderer is far better than the different type of image presentation that Sketchup can produce and many teachers have told me they would miss that functionality.
Now there is a new way to output your images created in Sketchup, through a product called Shaderlight. This, like all truly useful education programs, needs as little as one button push from within your Sketchup window to produce a high quality rendered image. For those new to rendering, it basically plots the path of light which reaches every pixel in an image so if a surface is transparent and shiny, the light reaching it wi
ll be affected by what goes through it, illuminates it and reflects off it. There are other renderers out there which many schools use effectively for higher level work, but they take a fair bit of intuition and experimentation to use. To date, Shaderlight seems to be the only one which gets it right with basic functionality that works with that elusive 'one button'. For the more tecchie, yes it supports bump map type functions, comes with built in light models and you can tweak some parameters, but for you running a class of 30 students who need simple results, it can be a single button press! For those new to rendering, expect to twiddle your thumbs a lot. A simple model at 640 x 480 pixels takes about 30 seconds and
as you add more details and lighting and increase the image size, it can run to many minutes, but it runs in the background while you get on with something else.
The sample model here is shown as a Sketchup screen capture, and also as a 1024 x 768 rendered image in Shaderlight. I have spent a couple of minutes optimising the image in shaderlight menu, but not much. This is one of the first 3d models in Sketchup I ever produced. I never thought it would ever look this good without redrawing in a different and sriously more expensive and complicated package...
