Material transfer (and management)

[eidam655]

hello,

i've decided to play with VRay (currently 1.49.01) & SketchUp (8 Pro) once again, this time sooner than the projects are due (im studying architecture).

so, the first thing i did was to download the elephant-sized 7GB torrent of VRay materials. after very brief sorting the materials and orientation in the file structure i decided to slowly begin loading the materials into SU, try to render them and (for example) pick the best grass material for exterior archviz (ie. second level of sorting). i would then keep all the good materials in one file as a repository. then, when i would work on some project of mine, i would simply use SU as material browser, pick the best, pack/save the chosen material, load into the other scene in sketchup and produce pretty pictures.

but i found a problem.

for example, i have a grass material with 2 diffuse layers (both with texture maps, first has also a transparency texture) and one displacement map.
after packing (or saving) the material (.vismat) and loading it to the other scene, all i get is the first diffuse layer, with the first texure, and nothing else (transparency settings gone, second diffuse layer gone, displacement map gone...)

could anyone tell me, why is this happening? how can it be avoided?
what are your ways of storing materials (and their textures) ?

and the last question - why on earth does VRay not support relative texture paths?

thank you for any reactions,
~Adam

[andybot]

how did you load them into the other scene? There is currently a bug in copying and pasting that does what you describe (lose layers in the material) If you save vismat and then load, it usually works. But having vray open in multiple windows is also sometimes buggy...

[eidam655]

i had two windows opened at the same time - the one with 'repository' and the new project.

'repository' -> find desired material -> save material -> open project window -> load material -> catastrophe

i followed your suggestion about having two windows open at the same time, so i tried to:

open repository -> find desired material -> pack material -> close rep. -> open project window -> load material -> win

thanks for reply.