I have tried nearly all of the available rendering plugins for Sketchup and when it comes to architects and designers who do the occasional render now and then, I rate Twilight Render as the best rendering plugin for Sketchup in terms of being the easiest to use straight off the bat, balanced with cost and overall rendering output quality.
This is the rendering plugin that I teach in my visualisation shortcourse and all of the renders that you see on my website and the Facebook galleries are generated with Twilight Render.
These are the reasons why I like Twilight Render:
Ease of Use: Twilight Render works completely within Sketchup which is comforting for most first time or occasional users. Its interface and tools interact with the Sketchup modelling window which feels logical. There is no exporting to different file formats to an external editor; everything that Twilight adds is contained within the Sketchup file. When compared with the V-Ray plugin for Sketchup and its user interface, it wins hands down; V-Ray’s interface is awful and will have most people scratching their heads in utter confusion.
Features: It is a fully featured program with few compromises. You can use environment maps, produce caustics, ambient occlusion, IES light data files, biased and unbiased rendering modes, create animations, proxy instances, and a lot more. Twilight Render uses the Kerkythea rendering engine and there are a lot of free resources that you can download and add to your plugin. While Twilight Render appears to be quite easy to use, there is enough complexity in the software to satisfy the more expert users.
Rendering Quality: It is hard to rate the quality of a rendering engine because it really depends so much on the experience and skill of the user. With V-ray being regarded as the industry standard, Twilight Render is not quite at that standard, but not too far behind. It is definitely not the fastest rendering engine and if you are not careful with your saturation and brightness of your materials, your rendered images can look a bit noisy or grainy in shadowed areas. But if you have a good eye for detail, there is virtually nothing you can’t render with Twilight Render.
Price and Value for Money: This is where Twilight Render makes the other 3d plugins look silly. The commercial version of Twilight Render is US$99 (V-Ray is US$760) which makes economic sense for the architect or designer that might do a few renders every now and then. For the features and price, Twilight Render is good value.
I am in no way an expert at photorealistic rendering and what I am able to get out of a 3d rendering plugin pales in comparison to what a 3d artist that does this stuff every day can do. And that is okay, because I am able to get what I need from Twilight Render and I didn’t break the bank buying the licence for it.
If you want to see what a serious 3d artist can do with Sketchup and Twilight Render, have a look at this image here.