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Kerkythea is a free but highly capable rendering program with great SketchUp interoperability. A new version is just out – see the following announcement for some more details. (We can’t pretend to understand what all of it means – but network rendering to unlimited Linux machines! – wow):

Kerkythea 2008 Echo is a full staging application for rendering your
models. And now it’s available for all major platforms Windows, Linux,
and MacOSX!

Introducing the Kerkythea Instancing Brush (Earning KT2008 the name
“Echo”)
It features instancing by loading the “Brush” with any model or group
of models and painting (scattering) instances of that onto any model
“canvas” object you choose. Or, you can choose auto-population of the
canvas determined by grid, or driven by image mask!

Now featuring MLT(BPT) Metropolis Light Transport on top of
Bidirectional Path Tracing to handle the most demanding indirect lighting scenes.

Robust and completely re-vamped material editor featuring nk/ior
measured data support, synthesis layer, procedural ramps, improved materials
and the new plugin SDK for user developed customized objects.

Also featuring:
-15-25% general render speed increase (more for MLT render mode)
-Multithreading support for all render methods
-Network rendering to unlimited machines/threads/cross-platform
(requires manual connection)
-Instancing and grouping of Lights or Models
-Sky Portals, Supersampling
-Physical Camera definition enhancements
-Parallel View Rendering for plans/elevations, etc.
-IES Light implementation
-Specular, Light, Diffuse, and Diffuse Texture passes
-Improved depth map rendering
-alpha channel auto-recognition for .png and .tif files
-More widgets (Drop and align commands, manual sun positioning)
-and much more

Kerkythea now supports a zipped xml version (kzx extension) for saving
files, which, combined with instancing, can result in file sizes 5% to
10% the size of previous versions’ saved .xml scenes.

The new cross-platform plugin SDK implementation allows users to write
their own plugins including new procedural textures, materials and
lights.

See the following link for download info:
http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42&func=select&id=2

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Rendering, SketchUp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.