If you have followed the chapters in this book so far and also did some exercises on your own, you should by now be fairly comfortable with producing artistic and convincing presentations. So, you may ask yourself why you should spend time and money on learning another rendering program that just shows the same thing that SketchUp does.

There are several features that an external renderer (also called a render engine) can add to SketchUp. Here is a short overview of computer graphic technologies and terms to help you understand the workflows you are about to learn. Perhaps, you already know about the points discussed in the following sections and just cannot put a name to the various features. In this case, this Computer Graphics Primer is a small aid to help you talk the talk.