sketchUcation

Rayscaper is an interactive, photorealistic render engine for SketchUp that is fun to use. You can use the Rayscaper free version or buy a license here on SketchUcation.

Please post your bugs, comments, or feedback in the Rayscaper new releases thread.

Rayscaper is tightly integrated with SketchUp, offering an interactive, instant feedback render workflow for creators:

First-Time Installation Process

You can install Rayscaper via the SketchUcation extension store (recommended) or by directly downloading it from SketchUcation and installing it via the SketchUp extension manager.

Installation via SketchUcation Extension Store (Recommended)

Installation via the SketchUp Extension Manager

Upgrade Process

Upgrading Rayscaper to a newer version is a manual process. Today, you can’t upgrade to a more recent version by installing it again via the SketchUcation tools. We will improve the upgrade process in a future version. Check out our upgrade documentation for instructions.

Quick Start Guide

The video below demonstrates how to use Rayscaper for first-time users. The video uses an example scene to walk the user through how they can configure standard render settings in Rayscaper. The video uses a demo scene that can be downloaded here:

Rayscaper documentation can be found here: https://rayscaper.com/docs/.

Version 0.9.10 Beta

• Add support for Sketchup 2024.

Version 0.9.9 Beta

• Add a panoramic projection mode to the camera.
• Add an orthographic projection mode. The camera is the Rayscaper equivalent of the parallel projection in SketchUp.
• Optionally sync the SketchUp field-of-view with the Rayscaper perspective camera. Note that the FOV in SketchUp differs from the value displayed in Rayscaper because SketchUp uses a vertical FOV value while Rayscaper uses a vertical FOV.
• Add a focal length control to the perspective camera. This is coupled to the horizontal FOV. I introduced this for users who prefer to work with focal length instead of FOV.
• Add a toggle to turn DOF on/off explicitly.
• Express the depth-of-field effect with a blurriness value instead of lens radius. This should make it easier to control the DOF effect.
• Make sure that the rendered image keeps its panning when the render restarts. Before this start, the panning would reset on every render restart, which was annoying.

Version 0.9.8 Beta

• Fix a self-intersection bug that was causing dark lines in CPU renders.
• Add support for a near-clipping plane to the camera. With the near clip plane, you can configure a near clip plane at a distance orthogonal to the camera, and Rayscaper will cut away all geometry before the clip plane.
• Improve the sliders in Rayscaper:
  • Every slider now supports dragging.
  • Scrolling is consistent across sliders. Each mouse scroll wheel increment/decrement will step up/down by one slider step value. Holding shift will step up or down with 10x the slider step value.
• Make global illumination (GI) the default render method for new scenes. Using approximate GI as the initial render method might give new Rayscaper users the wrong impression because of its non-physical hacks and limitations.

Version 0.9.7 Beta

• Support units for sliders and text boxes (not all sliders have it yet). For length units, Rayscaper will display values in units configured for the model (cm, mm, yd, etc).
• Fix a bug in the sphere light. The sphere light would become black when the radius increased, so the lights started intersecting geometry.
• Fix wonky behavior with the spotlight. The spotlight would become very bright when configuring a radius of zero.

Version 0.9.6 Beta

• Support import and export of Rayscaper materials. You can now share materials with other Rayscaper users.
• Add the option to mark assets as favorites.
• Remove material previews in the material editors. It takes up precious rendering resources and hampers interactivity on low-end machines.

Version 0.9.2 Beta

• Improve global UV editing. We will load the transformation of the first image texture in the global UV editor instead of using default values. This speeds up the UV editing workflow.
• Support inference locking for the Rayscaper light tools:
  • Holding down shift locks the current inferred direction, if any.
  • Pressing down the arrow keys locks to an axis direction.
• Fix the spotlight going black using CPU rendering when configuring the falloff as zero.

Version 0.9.1 Beta

• Add support for SketchUp colorized textures.
• Display the SketchUp icon in the user interface when textures use images that are embedded in the skp file.
• Rename the Rayscaper menu item "Preferences..." to "Settings...".

Version 0.9.0 Beta

• Fix the range for the Gaussian filter's falloff. It's not possible anymore to configure the falloff to zero, resulting in a black render.
• Add an option to the Help menu to open the Rayscaper documentation in your default browser.
• Add an option to the Help menu to open the Rayscaper Get Help page in your default browser.

Version 0.8.12 Alpha

• Fix a crash when plugging a procedural texture in the texture environment. The texture environment does not support procedural textures; we prevent that configuration in the user interface with this release.
• Fix duplicate light creation; sometimes, the same light would appear twice in Rayscaper.
• Improve the material preview scene, courtesy of Rich O'Brien from SketchUcation.
• Change the color for surfaces without a SketchUp material from an obnoxious cyan to a less obnoxious clay color.
• Display an error to the user when they try to pick a material on a surface with no material assigned.
• Improve the render window icons, courtesy of Rich O'Brien from SketchUcation.
• Display GPU memory (a.k.a. VRAM) usage in the render status bar.

Version 0.8.11 Alpha

• Don't trigger a pick when the user pans the render and releases the mouse button.
• Add keyboard shortcuts.
• Re-order the inputs of the Disney material and put more frequently used inputs first.
• Fix the scaling of SketchUp textures. Rayscaper will now correctly apply the dimensions configured textures that are part of materials applied to objects.
• Fix the loading of Rayscaper from directories with non-ASCII characters.

Version 0.8.10 Alpha

• Fix picking when the render image is zoomed in or out.
• Fix a render regression with clearcoat gloss in the Disney material.
• Tweak the look of the thumbnail components and display a checkerboard when the image has alpha.

Version 0.8.9 Alpha

• Make sure the Rayscaper data is saved when opening and closing the Rayscaper window in SketchUp.
• Support pan and zoom in the render viewport.
• Fix black edges in the diffuse material on grazing viewing angles.
• Fix a crash when dropping an HDRI environment without a previous environment.
• Improve the user interface for image textures.

Version 0.8.8 Alpha

• Fix a load error in version 0.8.7, making that version useless to end users.

Version 0.8.7 Alpha

• Fix a crash when deleting a material from SketchUp.
• Disable the live-link between SketchUp and Rayscaper when Rayscaper is not running.
• Represent the image texture configuration in a more screen-efficient manner.
• Support copy/past of light components.
• Add a splash screen for Rayscaper. The artwork is by the great Rich O' Brien from SketchUcation.
• Fix viewport matching. Rayscaper will now exactly match the resolution.

Version 0.8.6 Alpha

• Fix geometry updates when push-pulling faces. Sometimes, the faces adjacent to the one being push or pulled would not propagate to Rayscaper leading to out-of-sync geometry in Rayscaper.
• Support hiding and unhiding of SketchUp geometry and objects.
• Support hiding and unhiding of SketchUp tags (layers).

Version 0.8.5 Alpha

• Fix a failure when opening *.skp files that contain an incorrect path. The result of this load failure was that the Rayscaper settings were not correctly loaded.
• Support saving PNG images with non-ASCII characters in their path names.
• Fix a render bug when updating the normal map on the GPU.

Version 0.8.4 Alpha

• Fix a GPU rendering bug. The same scene, with the same configuration, would sometimes give different results when re-rendering the scene using the GPU.
• Support material inheritance. SketchUp faces that don't have geometry assigned can inherit the material from their parent instance or group.
• Fix the roughness control for glass and metal materials. Low roughness values look more reasonable now.
• Remove the spherical texture mapping option.

Version 0.8.3 Alpha

• Fix a crash when opening a recovered SketchUp file.
• Update the SketchUp toolbar icons. Icons are courtesy of Rich O' Brien.
• Fix a crash when we cannot create an OpenImage denoise device.

Version 0.8.2 Alpha

• Fix the alpha channel for GPU rendering.
• Fix the texture scaling for faces that inherit their material texture from the parent group or component.
• Fix a crash when refreshing SketchUp materials in the material editor.
• Make sure the Rayscaper installation process works for users that run multiple SketchUp instances in parallel.
• Support loading of image textures that are embedded in the skp file. Before this code change. Before this change, Rayscaper users could reload the materials from SketchUp to fix the textures, but these changes would be gone again after saving and reloading the file. Now users should be able to retain their changes after reloading the skp file.
• Fix a crash when editing the scene after clearing the Rayscaper data. Also changed the clearing behavior, Rayscaper will not reload the data after clearing the data.

Version 0.8.1 Alpha

• Fix a crash when deleting a SketchUp material while rendering using the GPU.
• Fix a crash for SketchUp materials that don't have a default color.
• Fix a bug when selecting categories and tags in the asset manager, now it's visibly clear which category or tag is selected by highlighting the correct item in the list.
• Fix an intermittent crash when downloading HDRI and texture thumbnails.
• Fix the artifacts in GPU rendering with high quality denoise enabled.

Version 0.8.0 Alpha

Release post on the SketchUcation forum: link.

• Add support for GPU rendering. Rayscaper supports NVIDIA boards with CUDA support and compute model 5.0 or higher. You can cross-check your video card specifications here.
• Add the option to toggle remapping of the values of the normal, dpdu, and dpdv render methods to RGB colors. Sometimes, it’s handy to display the raw values, which can be negative and will render black. Sometimes, it makes more sense to remap to RGB so that negative values also get a color.
• Improve the display of filenames in the user interface. Instead of displaying the full path, which is illegible, display only the filename. The tooltip displays the full path.
• Add swatches to the color selector.
• Change how Rayscaper works when unlicensed. Instead of always requiring a license, you can use Rayscaper without one ( i.e., for free), subject to the following limitations:
  • You are not allowed to use the renders for commercial purposes.
  • Watermarked renders.
  • Resolution limited to 1000 by 1000 pixels.
• Implement sending of anonymous usage statistics for Rayscaper. You can disable tracking via the global settings.
• Fix the incorrect handling of filesystem paths with non-ASCII characters.
• Display render errors in the viewport.
• Add the capability to save materials in the asset library and reuse them in other projects.
• Add a menu in SketchUp for Rayscaper (Extensions > Rayscaper).
• Change the Rayscaper toolbar title from “Rayscaper for SketchUp” to “Rayscaper”.
• Integrate Rayscaper with Sentry (https://sentry.io) for crash reporting.
• Change the Rayscaper log file (SUEX_Rayscaper.log) location from the user’s home directory to the application data directory (%APPDATA%/Rayscaper/SUEX_Rayscaper.log).
• Fix a crash when loading degenerate faces, i.e. faces without any vertices.

Version 0.7.3 Alpha

Release post on the SketchUcation forum: link.

• Fix the propagation of the “smooth normals” option to Rayscaper. Changing this property would not update Rayscaper before this change.
• Add the options to manipulate the normal map:
  • Flip the red channel.
  • Flip the green channel.
  • Swap the red and green channels.
• Add the option to specify the color space of an image texture (either normal RGB or float textures). This is very important to obtain correct render results when using LDR images (jpg / png / etc).
• Add the capability to export the model and all the assets used by Rayscaper to an archive (zip file).
• Update the styling of the thumbnails in the assert browser.
• Add increment/decrement buttons to modify numeric values. Pushing the buttons will increment/decrement by the step size. Holding the shift key while pushing the buttons will increment/decrement by 10x the step size.
• Don’t use sliders for configuration values that have a high range (for example, scale/translation/shear). It’s impossible to control such a large range with a slider precisely.
• Add the “Highlight Clamp” option which clamps bright incoming light to reduce bright pixels (fireflies).
• Reduce the logging in Rayscaper. This improves the performance of SketchUp when running Rayscaper.
• Fix the saving of the camera settings, image resolution, and tone mapping settings.
• Make the material and light lists resizable in the material and light tabs of the scene editor.
• Fix the saving of light data.
• Support emission for high-poly geometry.
• Fix the high power values required to light up a scene with sphere lights or spotlights. Now the user can punch in more realistic power values for the scene.
• Add a fake emission capability to emitters. With fake emission, the geometry the material is applied to will look like it is emitting light, but it won't actually act like a light source in the scene. This can reduce the render times.
• Fix the approximate global illumination kernel's washed-out ambient occlusion fake GI mode.
• Add a new environment fake GI mode to the approximate global illumination kernel. This mode uses the environment light to fake indirect light.
• Fix the albedo render pass.
• Improve the high-quality denoiser algorithm.
• Fix the time value in the render status bar. The timer would display wrong values when the render took longer than 1 hour.
• Sort the materials/lights alphabetically in the scene editor.

Version 0.7.2 Alpha

• Add a help button to the SketchUp toolbar, clicking this button launches a browser with the Rayscaper documentation.

Version 0.7.1 Alpha

• Fix reloading of SketchUp materials in Rayscaper.
• Fix a crash when loading a new image texture.

Version 0.7.0 Alpha

• This is the first public alpha release of Rayscaper.