whoops! I missed that version number... 1.48.93? Any reason you're not using at least 1.49.01? It was a free upgrade. You might end up saving enough time using the wrapper material in to justify the upgrade cost to 2.0. Depends on the learning curve required to do this all in post, and time it takes to actually get the result you want. Andy- I don't think there's really any other way around it, excluding what has already been discussed, aside from doing two separate render passes. One with just the model, and the other with the ground plane. That's how I would have done it back in the day.

I assume your scene is a 2D scene, coming from a photomatch? You can try 'Camera>Parallel Projection', then 'Camera>Perspective', then create a new scene. You should end up with a 3D scene with the same point of view. Vray should then handle it fine.

@dane.teegardin said: The SketchUp plug-in is version 2.00.23490, which I believe is a little outdated now. Try to disable auto-save feature of SU.

just a heads up, the OP posted this thread 4 years ago.

http://help.chaosgroup.com/vray/help/150SP1/tools_ply2vrmesh.htm I also have a tutorial on the Chaos Forums where I use the converter to make meshes for SketchUp.

There are a host of things you can do. Try using Catmull Rom AA filter and increase your Image sampler settings - Adaptive DMC Min 2 Max 12 Clr thresh .003 Increase your render size all of these things will increase render times dramatically.

If you've changed the color but it still shows as white, you might try reducing the intensity of the light. The light is probably just too bright to see the color in your render.

If you are unable to upload the file then there must be something wrong with it. It looks like it is only 10 faces, and the textures are simple it should be a tiny file size. If you have huge amounts of stuff hiding in the file it can cause problems. Purge everything from the file and try to upload it again.

To make the exports available in the Presets drop down you can manually save them to their own folder here: C:\ProgramData\ASGVIS\VfS\Presets\Options and it will generate in the drop down menu (as long as you've added it to the new folder you created). Be careful not to overwrite the existing defaults though. V-Ray does not overwrite the Options folder on a re-install, so if you overwrite anything you'll have to download it from the Chaos Group website and manually re-install it. Check out the tutorial here: http://help.chaosgroup.com/vray/help/sketchup/150PB/tutorials_preset.htm

it's bundled with the installer should be in the start menu

@khodan said: @dkendig said: looks like you're using DR, and something isn't transferring to the DR node properly. This should be resolved in our 2.0 release afaik. Have you tried a demo? What do you mean with a demo? we have a demo or trial version of our 2.0 version available on our website. I was making the assumption that you were not using VfS 2.0. Glad to hear you resolved the issue though

Normal maps work in 2.0 Taken from another forum... "Normal maps are just bump maps that allow for the appearance of a bump in any normal direction, not just at the normal. That's the problem with bump maps - everything appears to come "out" of the bump at exactly 90 degrees to the surface of the poly. That's why normal maps are full colour - the three colour channels correspond to the local XYZ space, as opposed to the single channel for bumps."

The main issue here, in my experience is memory consumption. SketchUp is limited to 4gb of ram, it doesn't matter what hardware you have, what operating system you have, etc. That's why Maxwell has an issue, and it's why V-Ray has an issue. If you are hitting that memory limit, you're going to crash. Sketchup on OSX appears to consume more memory than it does on Windows, as does the V-Ray plugin. Also, if you have multiple Sketchup models open on OSX at the same time, each model contributes to that 4gb memory limit. On windows, this is not the case. Each Sketchup window has it's own 4gb playground to work with. Many other modeling applications have made the jump to become a 64bit application, which allows an application to use far more memory. Currently it's not even possible to have a computer that exceeds the maximum amount of memory that a 64bit application can use (it's something like 18 exobytes). When you load SketchUp, it loads any extensions that are currently installed and active. If you have many plugins, you're going to use more memory. Just loading V-Ray's dependencies can take some time, and eat up quite a bit of memory. V-Ray does indeed scan over the model and look for textures, materials, lights, proxies, etc. During that process, it consumes more memory as it builds various data structures that help us interact with the SketchUp model, and even render it in real time. It's possible to have a model that will crash due to memory consumption on OSX, by simply opening the model, and due to OSX's feature which will allow an application to reopen whatever documents were last open in the application, it's possible to end up in the crashing loop as described above. The workaround of moving a file is very effective in breaking the endless loop of crashes. This prevents V-Ray from scanning the file, and prevents SketchUp from loading the file in to memory in the first place. If you have any example scenes that demonstrate this issue, and are willing to share them for diagnostic purposes, please contact me, because I would like to resolve as many of these issues as possible before we release our next patch. You can reach me at devin.kendig@usa.chaosgroup.com. We now have a dedicated VfS for OSX developer, as well as a developer solely devoted to VfS for Windows. We are hoping we can resolve this issue, but it may require some work on the part of Trimble, to allow plugins such as V-Ray and Maxwell to utilize more memory than we are currently limited to.

the upcoming patch will add the ability to find external file references that are used in imported skp files which are used a component definitions. This should help with a number of missing file reference issues.

Oh yeah! Thats great news Devin.

Sweet material and sweet tutorial Andy.

That's excellent, thanks for the recommendation!

The Chaosgroup one AFAIR is made with the angle blend. I know I've used it before - just had to adjust the color to suit.

Thanks! I do highly recommend all of the Onyx products for making 3d landscaping for SketchUp and for V-Ray proxies. You decide what the tree looks like and how many polys. Endless creations from one purchase. When you buy pre made trees on the web you are confined by their 10-20 trees and cannot be as creative. Onyx is also great at reducing and optimizing models so you can make SketchUp plants and are fairly low polygon. Another tip - Being able to use geometric leaves cuts your render times down considerably. I would only recommend alpha transparency on leaves that are in the fore and middle ground of your project. If you are rendering a forest, I would definitely go with the geo leaves.

oh god. valerostudio solve it Thanks dude.