What is Reddit's opinion of Kerkythea?

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Kerkythea will render Sketchup models pretty nicely and will allow you to do what you want. I recall it has a plugin integrating it directly into the software (but this was years ago and the current version may not be supported).

I have some old renders from 2010 that prove you can get acceptable results with very little effort.

As already stated, SketchUp! Its intuitive and if you watch the tutorials you can learn enough to start designing well in a few days.

If you get more into it all Autodesk software is free to download as a student (as a trial) although I'm not sure if there is a way to convince it you are a student when you aren't.

Kerkythea is a free sketch up add on that can render lighting conditions as well. If that's what you're into.

However, if you just need the model, SketchUp is the easiest to learn quickly.

Watch the videos they'll save you time!

Good luck.

Not sure if you have time, but there are various external rendering software, but most takes some time to get used to to be able to get polished results:
Yafray

Kerkythea

Blender and Cycles

I never thought it was slow, but I've never used any of the other renderers that are available for SketchUp. It's free, so you wont see me complaining.

I really didn't put much effort into these scenes, things can look a lot better with a little more effort: Examples. More examples.

A: Sketchup Pro features definitely are worth it. Especially the dwg export/import.

B: http://www.sketchup.com/buy/corporate-solutions

C: I would vote for Thea render, the price is right and the perfomance/quality is amazing. You can get Kerkythea for free and still produce quite respectable renders although you will not be able to match Thea. Kerkythea predates Thea render and is not developed but team behind them is the same.

Hei, wait a minute! I didn't know that kirky also exists for Mac!! This one, in my opinion is even better. I never touched a Mac in my life but in the past I've achieved results almost good as vray with this one. http://www.kerkythea.net/cms/index.php/downloads/18

I use Kerkythea to get images with photo-realistic lighting. A model can be exported from Sketchup with the scene/camera, materials and global lighting all intact. Also artificial lights can be added by modelling them in Sketchup, then setting the 'light source material' to illuminate in Kerkythea.

It is free and fairly easy to get started, but it's also quite powerful when you dig a bit deeper. If your interested I could explain a bit more, but first check out the website: http://www.kerkythea.net/

Kerkythea is really nice. in my opinion it is a stripped down max. http://www.kerkythea.net/cms/ its free and there are tutorials as well. It is not well known but it gets the job done in my opinion.

Yup - you can texture faces and you can even render images to look pretty damn impressive.

Outside with basic texture

kerkythea render gallery

Some renderings are pretty sweet - I want to start playing with those but it's just a hobby I've been doing lately so I dunno how far I want to take it heh

In addition to Sketchup you can use an open source light rendering add on called Kerkythea

Perks: it's free and it works.

For a past project I built in Revit, exported to Sketch up and rendered in Kerkythea with some additional rendering in photoshop.

Also, if you want to learn 3D modeling in general, Sketchup is a good choice. You can get plugins and rendering tools like Kerkythea to do more artistic/photo-realistic stuff. It's not going to be the best tool for any specific use-case, but it's a great all-rounder for most, especially for the price.