TurboSketch

Overview of changes

Changes fall into three main areas:

(1) SketchUp support. This version includes support for SketchUp 6 and SketchUp 7.

(2) Quality. We have made numerous changes to improve the overall image quality. Mac users in particular will see some big improvements, and all users will see greater control over the final output.

(3) Ease of use. We have gone much further to support SketchUp files the way you model them. Now you can render what you model instead of having to make model changes specific to your renderer!

SketchUp Support
Version 1.1 can be installed in SketchUp 6 and/or SketchUp 7. We have gone further than simply installing in SketchUp 7 but have made fundamental changes to support the main features of SketchUp 7, in particular Dynamic Components. See Ease of Use below.

Image Quality

Overall rendering quality is much better with v1.1 than it was with version 1.0, particularly for Mac users. On the Mac version we have added improved anti-aliasing, corrected the color temperature of environmental lighting, and lots of smaller adjustments.

On both the PC and Mac versions we have improved our IDX Material Attribute settings and have added a material finish Reflectance Slider. This allows you to select a finish such as Polished or Metal Dull, and fine tune the level of reflectance.

We have also improved the quality of the material preview so that the new overwrites the old providing a view of the difference as changes are made.

We made many other improvements and fixed a number of bugs.

Ease of Use

With the Mac version we have added a material preview to the IDX Material Attributes dialog. This helps you see the impact of your changes before rendering.

With both the PC and Mac versions the material preview now uses multithreading on multicore systems to show those changes more quickly and speed your model preparation.

Improved memory management supports larger files than before.

Deeper SketchUp integration supports a better, faster workflow. You can render what you model, so you don’t have to model for your renderer:

Materials applied to multi-level nested components and groups, as opposed to individual faces, render correctly. Supports Dynamic Components without having to explode them for the material to be applied to the faces. This is critical for SketchUp 7 support, because exploding a dynamic component is an act that breaks the component's intelligence, losing the dynamic aspect.

Imported Images render as they appear and don’t have to be exploded and used as a texture.

Use either side of faces without concern for “Normal” and “Reverse” sides, and support for different material on both sides.

Material texture changes made through the SketchUp material window are fully supported. When using the new Combine Textures command in SketchUp 7 the new texture takes on default IDX Material attributes for a predictable result.

SketchUp Styles sky and ground color changes are properly supported when the SketchUp colors are selected for use in the Environment settings.

Proper camera position is supported for all views and perspectives. (Note, December 10, 2008: there are some SketchUp 6 models that when rendered in SketchUp 7 may shift the view; typically this can be corrected by updating the scene and style settings in SketchUp 7. We are still trying to identify when and why this happens so please let us know if you see anything.)

SketchUp sun position can be overridden more easily and accurately when needed, for example when selecting a position for moonlight that differs from an accurate Sun position.