Thea for SketchUp

Thea for SketchUp is a high-end, fast render plugin for SketchUp Pro. It combines the powerful Thea rendering engines with the simplicity of SketchUp. Having biased, unbiased and interactive render modes including GPU support at your fingertips, inside SketchUp view, rendering is a joyful experience. Thea has got a built-in online library and is compatible with Extensions as Skatter and Skalp.

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Versatile

With Thea Render you can switch between different render engines. From 'Quick 'n Dirty' to slow but accurate.

Interactive

Preview the composition, materials and lights in your scene interactively, either inside the dedicated Thea window or directly inside SketchUp view!

Advanced

Thea Render has several advanced features such as an extensive material editor, dark room for light adjustments, render channels, dispersion, depth of field and much more!

Functions

Thea Render is equipped with the following functionalities to offer you the highest level of rendering.

Viewport Rendering

Thea for SketchUp interactive render mode allows you to preview the composition, materials and lights in your scene interactively, either inside the dedicated Thea window or directly inside SketchUp view in Overlay or Blending mode. With the use of Interactive Region Rendering a desired part of SketchUp view can be selected for focusing render effort.

Advanced Materials

Thea for SketchUp lets you benefit from the powerful Thea Material Editor which supports physically-based materials and layering, lighting emittance, displacement and alpha mapping. Additionally, with the use of Thea Content Browser you can have access to an increasing variety of ready-to-use high quality Thea materials and apply them easily to your models.

External Models

Thea for SketchUp provides a solution that overcomes limitations in terms of complexity of the final model. High quality external Thea models can be inserted as empty wireframe boxes inside SketchUp viewport and, in the rendered image, be translated into highly detailed originals, allowing easy population of impressively looking trees, grass, cars and more.

Section Cuts

With Thea for SketchUp you are able to render Sections, without any modification of your model. It allows you to take a “look inside” while geometry is still contributing to reflections and light bounces. This way the lighting in the model is not altered which is beneficial for illumination design.

Animation

With the use of Thea for SketchUp, any animation can be rendered as seen in the SketchUp view. This means that it supports all animation plugins that show their output directly in the view, during animation play-back along with physics animation plugins, like MSPhysics.

Complete Feature List

Interactive Viewport Rendering witht Overlay
Thea for SketchUp interactive render mode allows you to preview the composition, materials and lights in your scene interactively, either inside the dedicated Thea window or directly inside SketchUp view in Overlay or Blending mode. With the use of Interactive Region Rendering a desired part of SketchUp view can be selected for focusing render effort.
Advanced Materials
Thea for SketchUp lets you benefit from the powerful Thea Material Editor which supports physically-based materials and layering, lighting emittance, displacement and alpha mapping. Additionally, with the use of Thea Content Browser you can have access to an increasing variety of ready-to-use high quality Thea materials and apply them easily to your models.
External Models
Thea for SketchUp provides a solution that overcomes limitations in terms of complexity of the final model. High quality external Thea models can be inserted as empty wireframe boxes inside SketchUp viewport and, in the rendered image, be translated into highly detailed originals, allowing easy population of impressively looking trees, grass, cars and more.
Section Cuts
With Thea for SketchUp you are able to render Sections, without any modification of your model. It allows you to take a “look inside” while geometry is still contributing to reflections and light bounces. This way the lighting in the model is not altered which is beneficial for illumination design.
Animation
With the use of Thea for SketchUp, any animation can be rendered as seen in the SketchUp view. This means that it supports all animation plugins that show their output directly in the view, during animation play-back along with physics animation plugins, like MSPhysics.
Panoramic Images
With Thea for SketchUp you are able to render your scene using camera with spherical projection. The resulting image will be a panorama that can be viewed on a VR headset, by an external program or a web application. It is especially valuable for presenting interiors to clients as it gives an excellent impression of the proposed solutions.
Content Browser
With the use of Thea Content Browser you are able to browse from within SketchUp all Thea materials, models, skies and proxies found in your folders. You can then easily apply a material or insert a model inside your scene with the click of a button!
And much more
- Dark Room for editing light sources afterwards
- Render channels for fascinating effects
- Sky Dome for manually setting the sun
- Artificial Lights: point light, spots, IES, projector, mesh light and face light
- HDRI / Image Based Lighting
- Dispersion
- Rendering of the whole spectre
- Depth-of-field and Motion Blur
- Volumetric rendering
- Two point perspective for architectural designs
- Subsurface scattering
- Thin film
- Clay Rendering
- Fur
- Batch Rendering

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System Requirements

systeemeisen-windows

Software:

Windows 7 to 10 - 64 Bit
SketchUp 2019 and later

System Requirements:

Intel i7 4-Core processor or higher
8 GB RAM
Video card 2+ GB 100% OpenGL*
3-button mouse with scroll function

Video card

* If you are looking for a new system or upgrade, please pay extra attention to the video card. We do recommend video cards with an Nvidia RTX chip. These cards support OpenGL very well and have qualitative drivers.

systeemeisen-macos

Software:

macOS 10.13 - 10.15
SketchUp 2019 and later

System Requirements:

Intel i7 4-Core processor or higher
Please note: Thea Render is not yet compatible with the Apple M1 processor!
8 GB RAM
Video card 2+ GB 100% OpenGL*
3-button mouse with scroll function

Videokaart

* If you are looking for a new system or upgrade, please pay extra attention to the video card. For Apple we recommend video cards compatible with a recent version of OpenGL. Integrated chip sets are not supported.

systeemeisen-linux

At this moment, there is no Linux version of Thea Render available

Pricing

Commercial Licenses

Thea Render for SketchUp - 1-Year floating license

Thea Render for SketchUp - 3-Year floating license

€ 249,- excl. VAT

€ 599,- excl. VAT

Educational Licenses

Resellers

You can buy Thea Render through one of our dedicated resellers:

Thea for SketchUp History

New in Thea for SketchUp v4.0 Pre Release (May 2024)

Thea Render Nitro engine
The all-new Nitro engine was built from scratch delivering phenomenal performance and interactivity. Taking advantage of hardware ray tracing cores the new engine is an order of magnitude faster than our Thea Render Presto engine and supports all modern NVidia, AMD and Intel discrete GPUs as well as Apple Silicon GPUs.
Scattering
Use the scatter tool to create grass fields and distribute plants, and trees.
Fur
Cover surfaces with fur strands to make rugs, cloth, and other items look more appealing.
Reworked user interface
The user interface has been redesigned to improve the user experience. It is now fully integrated and available in both dark and light themes.
New material editor
A new PBR-compliant material definition is introduced that supports the metallic/roughness workflow.
Tone mapping variance
Bitmap tonemapping parameters such as saturation, hue, and gamma can be randomized to add variation to a scene using a single material.
Intel® Open Image Denoise (GPU Accelerated)
Nitro engine is making use of the latest GPU accelerated version providing stunning results and the ability to use it for interactive rendering.

New in Thea for SketchUp v3.5 (March 2022)

UV Randomizer
UV Randomizer is an extra option in the Coordinates panel which helps in removing the repetition and randomizes the material for all instances sharing the same one. A good use case here is a parquet floor as seen in the following example.
Bitmap Randomizer
To make the UV Randomizer more powerful, Thea also introduced the Bitmap Randomizer option. Bitmap Randomizer provides an additional way to add variation to the scenes. You may now assign multiple bitmaps to a channel which will then be applied randomly to all instances sharing the same material. One additional option with the Bitmap Randomizer is that the probability of each texture is now controlled by the weight percentage of each loaded bitmap. As one would expect, the Bitmap Randomizer is not limited to images but includes procedurals too. Finally, the Bitmap Randomizer can be combined with the UV Randomizer and create smart materials with small effort.
Random Glints
With the addition of Random Glints, it is easier than ever to create glittery surfaces containing small mirror-like flakes that react to the light. While this result can be achieved with the use of normal maps, the new feature is well integrated in the material setup workflow and can be turned on with a single click.
Substance 3D Materials Support
In version 3.5 of the Thea Render integrations, native support for Substance 3D materials has been added. There is no need to convert Substance 3D materials to Thea Materials since .sbsar files can now be opened from within the Thea material editor and get access to the Substance 3D parameters.
Global Coordinates
Global Coordinates is a workflow enhancement that will make the coordinates handling a lot easier. Global Coordinates remove the hassle of going through each one of the bitmaps of a material and allows one to change them all at once.
More updates
- SketchUp 2022 support (on macOS, M1 is not supported)
- Intel Open Image Denoiser updated to v1.4.1 with improved fine detail preservation
- Material Editor redesign
- Smart coordinates synchronization (Helps with adjusting coordinates only in textures sharing the same values in the whole material.)
- Point Light Intersection (Makes point lights visible when Soft Radius is enabled and speeds up caustics from highly reflective materials.)

New in Thea for SketchUp v3 (March 2021)

Relight Editor
Relight allows the user to create infinite images from a single render. When Relight is enabled, every light in the scene can then be modified (intensity, color and status) and create different lighting setups in post production. Every Relight setup can be saved in the Relight Editor panel as a Snapshot and then loaded back to the Darkroom for further editing or exported to an image file.
Intel® Open Image Denoiser
The Intel Open Image Denoiser is now integrated inside Thea Render. The AI-accelerated denoiser provides high quality noise free images and runs on the CPU.
Interactive Denoising
Denoising with both Intel’s and NVIDIA’s AI denoisers is also supported during an interactive rendering session.
Support for NVIDIA® CUDA® 11
Thea Render makes use of the latest NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit which introduces support for the NVIDIA Ampere architecture.
Adaptive Tracing
Adaptive Tracing is a technique that solves difficult lighting scenarios, such as caustics from point lights, sun pool caustics and diffuse interreflections. This results in images with a higher dynamic range and lighting effects that were previously impossible.
Random Color Texture
Random color is a procedural texture that can be used to add variation to your instanced models and create rich looking images for grass, bushes, trees, wooden floors and more.
Local Proxy Material Editing
Thea Proxy materials can now be edited with the Material Editor with a click of a button.
Better refresh of high resolution production renders
High resolution images refresh now faster without locking the interface.
Optimized Glare
Glare is now multithreaded and CPU/GPU accelerated, making it a lot faster.
Faster interactive scene updates
Geometry heavy scenes perform faster during interactive rendering and object translation is now a lot faster.
More updates
- Support for Lindalë Skatter™ v2
- Out-of-core Rendering
- Multithreaded export
- HDR Region Render
- Enhanced Channels
- Improved interactiveness
- UI Improvements