Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Material Channels Video


Material Channels are used to adjust the color of materials without having to re-render your model.

This video shows you how to quickly adjust material colors while rendering your SketchUp model with IRender nXt.

For more information visit: http://irendernxt.com

Monday, December 20, 2010

Creating HDRi Backgrounds

The latest version of IRender nXt includes a button on the Background Setup Tab to create a HDRi image from a normal, "tone mapped", image.


You can use a, (non panoramic), HDRi image as a background.

Settings for Inverse Tone Mapping 
Tone mapping, (converting from HDRi to normal images), takes luminance and creates RGB colors for display or saving in an image. Inverse tone mapping reverses that equation. nXt's tone operator requires two other pieces of information in order to invert it properly-- the average luminance and the maximum luminance of a scene. The way it works at the moment is that you select Daylight, Nighttime to get default values, and then adjust the custom settings for Average and Maximum illumination in the image.

Lumens and Default Values
After selecting a normal, ("Tone Mapped"), image, you can set the Average Lumens and maximum Lumens which control how bright the image will appear.
  • Daylight 5,000 and 20,000
  • Nighttime 1 and 500
Load this image as a Planar HDRi Background 
After converting your image, you can load it as a HDRi background for rendering.

Image Adjustments
If you use a Planar HDRi background with the [[[Path Tracer]], you can adjust its brightness as an additonal lighting channel after rendering. (This is not working with the standard renderer yet)

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Article in Daily CatchUp

Check the article on IRender nXt in the Daily CatchUp at SketchUcation:

IRender nXt 3.5 for SketchUp 8



IRender nXt 3.5 for SketchUp 8 from RenderPlus http://irendernxt.com/ is now available. Based on our nXt technology, IRender nXt is the premier, easy to use rendering tool for Google SketchUp.

Read more...

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Material Channels

You can take a look at a hot new feature of IRender nXt - Material Channels.

Material Channels let you alter the color of materials, after rendering, without having to re-render the entire scene.

Take a look at the latest: Beta Test Version