Powerful engine combined with the simplicity of Trimble SketchUp®. Enjoy the seamless integration of hardware-accelerated ray tracing for interactive rendering in SketchUp. Enrich your models with highly detailed content, and no limitations.
What's new
Parallax Occlusion Mapping
Enhanced surface details
Focus to Object
Craft cinematic animations
Sheen
Bring fabrics to life
Smart Resolution
Cut down on render times
Material Override
Surfaces simplified
… and many more
Key features
🆕 Scatter tool
Scatter is a versatile tool designed to help you distribute and populate instances within your scenes efficiently. It allows you to place multiple objects or elements across a designated area, ensuring a natural and randomized arrangement. Additionally, Scatter is perfect for adding greenery to your scenes, enabling you to seamlessly integrate plants, trees, and other vegetation, creating a more vibrant and lifelike environment.
🆕 Fur tool
Fur is a practical tool that enhances the visual appeal of various surfaces by covering them with realistic fur strands. This tool is particularly useful for creating detailed and attractive rugs, cloth, and other items that benefit from a textured, furry appearance. By using Fur, you can add a layer of depth and realism to your projects, making them more engaging and lifelike.
Nitro material editor
A new PBR-compliant material definition has been introduced, supporting the metallic/roughness workflow for more accurate and realistic rendering of materials. This enhancement provides greater flexibility and precision in achieving lifelike textures and finishes.
🆕 Tone mapping variance
Bitmap tonemapping parameters like saturation, hue, and gamma can be randomized to add variation to a scene using a single material. This creates diverse visual effects and moods, enhancing the scene’s overall appearance.
Viewport interactive rendering
Run interactive rendering either inside Thea window or directly inside the SketchUp view. Additionally, with the use of interactive region rendering, you can select and render a region of the SketchUp view, providing ultra-fast feedback for complex scenery. With the addition of the NVIDIA and Intel AI denoisers, it is also possible to make use of denoising while in interactive mode.
Proxy models
Adding Thea models in the scene is a very simple task. Editing them in the viewport is even easier and fun to use. With a click of a button, you get access to all of the proxy’s materials and modify them interactively. Proxy material editing has the option to revert back to the default materials.
Relight editor
Relight creates infinite images from a single render. When Relight is enabled, every light in the scene can 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 rendering window for further editing or exported as an image file.
Fog presets
With Thea for SketchUp you can adjust the Global Medium of your scene, via the settings at the Environment tab. The Fog preset allows you to control the fog density, the bottom and top positions, and create unique photo realistic renderings. Additionally, there is also a Cloud material preset for adding volumetric effects on defined solid groups or components.
Scene provided by: Jean Thiriet
Point lights
Thea for SketchUp has its own point lights that can be added and modified in the scene. Several parameters can be modified interactively. The available point lights are: spot light, omni, IES and projector.
Image credits: Alejandro Sorianο
Point light editing
The light editing tool not only allows precise light positioning, but it can also give live feedback while rendering interactively in the main window.
Powerful material editor
The advanced Thea material editor brings all the advanced and unique features of Thea materials. The user interface has been designed, following SketchUp’s simplicity and ease of use. Start from a preset or switch to the advanced layer-based editor.
Content browser
The integrated content browser provides access to local and online Thea Render assets such as: materials, models and environments. The online repository gives access to thousands of Thea materials submitted by the community.
Section cuts
Section cuts are supported in SketchUp. Section cuts allow you to cut through buildings and rooms maintaining the same interior lighting as if the external walls were still in place.
Lindalë Skatter™
Thea for SketchUp provides support for the powerful scattering extension.
Other features
Random color
Random color is a procedural texture that can be used to add variation to your instanced models and create unique effects such as grass, bushes, trees, wooden floor and more.
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.
AI denoising
Thea for SketchUp supports both NVIDIA and Intel AI Denoisers, offering GPU and CPU accelerated denoising for both interactive and production renderings. They dramatically reduce the render time, creating high-quality and noise-free images.
Shadow catcher
Integrate your models into a scene with a background image, introducing realistic shadows produced by IBL, sun and Thea point lights. It can also produce real reflections on the ground-plane.
Photoshop PSB/PSD Support
Random color is a procedural texture that can be used to add variation to your instanced models and create unique effects such as grass, bushes, trees, wooden floor and more.
Resume rendering
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.
Intel® Open Image Denoise (GPU Accelerated)
Thea for SketchUp supports both NVIDIA and Intel AI Denoisers, offering GPU and CPU accelerated denoising for both interactive and production renderings. They dramatically reduce the render time, creating high-quality and noise-free images.
Spectral Renderer | Online repository | Automatic exposure | Stereoscopic rendering | Out-of-core rendering
Learning Course
Part One: Introduction
In the first part of the course we will be learning about the User Interface and the Thea Render workflow.
Part One: Exterior
In the second part of the course you will be rendering an exterior scene and learn about: Materials, Content Browser, Random Color, Environment, Tonemapping & Exposure, Denoising, Beveled Edges, Clay Render and Production Rendering.
Part One: Interior
In the third and last part of the course we will be rendering an interior scene and learning about: exposure, converting 3D models, using Relight, Depth of Field and finally Scene Settings & Batch Rendering.
Download SketchUp scene
You can follow up with the course by download the scene.
Thea Render for SketchUp
- Commercial licenses include unlimited render node licenses at no cost
- Thea for SketchUp is the integration and does not contain any bundled standalone application.
Thea Render for SketchUp
- Commercial licenses include unlimited render node licenses at no cost
- Thea for SketchUp is the integration and does not contain any bundled standalone application.
SketchUp® is a registered trademark of Trimble Inc.
System requirements
Windows
Windows 10 /11 64-bit, Intel SSE3 CPU (or compatible)
Presto GPU
- Nvidia CUDA Graphics Card (Compute Capability 5.x / 6.x / 7.x / 8.x / 9.0 / 10.x / 12.0) with latest graphics driver
Nitro GPU
- NVIDIA: RTX 20 Series or newer (hardware acceleration), GTX 10 SERIES
- AMD: RX7000 series or newer
- Intel: Arc GPUs A310-A770
NVIDIA OptiX Denoiser
- Nvidia 5.0 min compute capability required for Nvidia OptiX denoising in interactive rendering.
- Nvidia 3.0 min compute capability card required for Nvidia OptiX denoising in production rendering.
Intel Open Image Denoiser
- Intel SSE4.1 CPU (or compatible) required for Intel Open Image Denoiser.
Supported SketchUp versions: 2018 – 2026
macOS
macOS 11/12/13/14
- Intel SSE3 CPU (or compatible),
- Apple Silicon
Nitro GPU
- macOS 13+
- Apple M1/M2/M3/M4
Intel Open Image Denoiser
- Intel SSE4.1 CPU (or compatible) required for Intel Open Image Denoiser
Supported SketchUp versions: 2018 – 2026