What does V-Ray for Sketchup look like?
1I've been creating a city map for my TV Sitcom using Sketchup. Unfortunately Sketchup does not allow you to change the sky to an image, and the workaround of adding a facade sky results in extreme clipping. This project has a diameter of 100km, even though the city is only about 10km. This means that zooming in closer than 10m to an object makes it disappear.
I was hoping the expensive VRay plugin would solve this, but this plugin does not allow you to put images in the sky either. What it does do, however, is allow you to 1. Remove edges, 2. Add proper materials and 3. Add lights. This does not seem to fix the extremely user unfriendly and outdated Sketchup sunshine system, though, which causes massive shadow and lighting problems.
I tried a free program called 'Blender', but navigating the model in that program is like using Sketchup while wearing a strait jacket. Navigating in Blender feels like the keyboard has glue under the keys. The user interface on Blender is outrageously bad, and the unhelpful Blender community are a bunch of angry stoners who expect you to have ten years experience before you ask a question. Also, compared to the ease of creating a map in Sketchup with accurate measurements and easy to use rulers, measurements in Blender practically don't exist. It is a base program with a bunch of largely incompatible plugins wobbling on top of it. Knowing how to use the interface takes years of patience because the entire experience is just work-arounds for broken software.
VRay for Sketchup is not good enough for the price, but given Sketchup allows you to at least draw a general map and architecture, its unfortunately the only choice. Problems from ten years ago in Sketchup have not been fixed, and seems like they never will be.
For these reasons I do not recommend Sketchup OR Blender. I do not have much experience in other 3D software, but some alternatives are Unity (a total mess), Rhino, Solidworks, 3D Max and Maya. I don't know much about these programs, but the rule is: if you require instructions instead of simply intuition, the software was not built properly. There is NO reason these programs should be hard to use.