• Podium Browser is now fully included with SU Podium V2.6. Boost your efficiency with over 25,000 render-ready furniture items, materials, and more.
• SU Podium now supports image-based lighting and includes five HDRI backgrounds. These images contain realistic luminance and tonal data captured directly from real-world environments.
• Improved multi-threaded Podium Exporter to make the most of your CPU
• HDR editing in Podium Image Editor

Image-based lighting is a versatile, realistic approach to natural lighting, and lets the user easily test a number of different lighting scenarios to choose the one that best showcases each project.

Licensed users are entitled to a large library of additional HDRIs that can be added directly from Podium Browser.

Realistic Materials

An essential part of creating SketchUp models is applying textures to faces. SU Podium can turn these plain textures into realistic materials, quickly and intuitively via the Podium material user interface. Reflections, refractions, bump maps and other advanced properties can be applied to a specific SketchUp materials. When rendered these properties bring the model to life by reflecting light and the environment. You can use standard SketchUp materials, or higher resolution textures from a variety of libraries. as well as the included Podium Browser content.

Sun and Sky

SU Podium has two types of natural lights. Sky and Sun. These are both "exterior" lights but will have a lot of effect on interior renderings if you are using windows and openings to the exterior.

• Sky Light is an ambient light source applied evenly to the entire SketchUp background sky.
• Sun Light is a directional light source that uses SketchUp's sky and shadow settings (SketchUp shadows must be turned on). The sun's brightness, exposure and shadow direction can easily be controlled by changing SketchUp's time of day and year in the Shadows dialog. When sun light is on, you can use Podium's Physical Sky to create a realistic sky background with atmospheric qualities such as turbidity and realistic tonemapping.

Artificial Lights

Omni & Spot Lights
Omni light or Point light is an artificial light source which emits light uniformly in all directions, similar to a light bulb. To insert an omni light or point light, click on the point light icon in the tool bar and drag an omni light into the model. The omni light/ point light is a SketchUp group called a light group. You can see the light group in SketchUp's outliner.

LEM Lights
Unlike Omni and Spotlights, Podium LEM materials use actual SketchUp geometry to cast illumination into a SketchUp scene. LEM materials can be applied to any face in your SkethUp model an used as a visible illumination source (like a lightbulb, neon sign, etc.)

Hidden LEM
LEMs can also be made invisible by checking the hidden LEM option in the material editor. Hidden LEM lights will still cast light into your SketchUp scene, but any surface with a Hidden LEM material applied will be invisible in the rendered image. This is a powerful feature that lets you hide the light source but creates an evenly distributed light and is extremely useful for creating behind camera "fill lights" to fine tune your lighting.

Post Processing with Podium Image Editor

PIE is part of SU Podium. It was created so that Podium users can do quick post processing or image editing of Podium rendered images. Post processing means making changes to the bitmap image created by Podium. For example, editing the light levels, brightness, cropping the image, adding a background to alpha transparent image, create Depth of Field areas, adding an overlay and blending are some of PIE's features.

To do any post processing, previously, you needed a good image editor like Photoshop. PIE makes it easy to do much of the post processing inside SketchUp and in fact directly from SU Podium after the rendering is completed