Encompassed

SketchUp's Real-Time Rendering Moment: Lumion View, AI Render, and the End of the Export Workflow

SketchUp 2025–2026 has added native PBR materials, AI image generation, and real-time rendering plugins like Lumion View, letting archviz artists produce photorealistic images without leaving the viewport. This collapses the traditional design-to-render pipeline.

Encompassed

A prometheus-styled render created with Maya, mental ray and satellite data. 51 minutes to render I used a lot of displacements to make this scene easy to render, the terrain clocks in at about 3 million polygons and the ufo, surprisingly, less than 10,000. I tiled the 28k texture into 4 by 2 images at 8k each, (maya cant handle more than 8192x8192 very well). The physical sun and sky was extremely helpful in creating the lighting for this scene, I used the photographic node aswell just to create interesting tone mapping. The satellite data is from USGS viewer and it is the grand canyon.

Software: maya, mentalray, usgsviewer, googleearth, blender, photoshop

Posted on 27.05.2014