Rayscaper New Releases

majid

I have a question regarding material libraries. I have prepared a Carpaint collection and am also going to prepare a water material pack. The question is that if the same name materials will be replaced? i.e. a car paint in my library is called 001red. Imagine there is another material in the Sketchup model by user and called 001red, I am wondering if RS will replace the same name with my material? To be more precise: How do material libraries in RS work?

Mike Amos

I must admit to being more than a little biased here, Majid's contributions in this department have been extremely helpful. Personally, I would like to see all the finish items from twilight included in Rayscaper, they would much improve the goal of simplicity with speed.

pixelcruncher

@majid said in Rayscaper New Releases:

I have a question regarding material libraries. I have prepared a Carpaint collection and am also going to prepare a water material pack. The question is that if the same name materials will be replaced? i.e. a car paint in my library is called 001red. Imagine there is another material in the Sketchup model by user and called 001red, I am wondering if RS will replace the same name with my material? To be more precise: How do material libraries in RS work?

Nice, users will love those material packs!

No — naming your materials isn’t essential for Rayscaper. Names only matter for finding them in the material library. They are necessary for the user, not for the software.

Behind the scenes, Rayscaper stores each material as a material pack, which is simply a ZIP file. This pack includes a human-readable configuration file and all the texture images used by the material. I will add this format to my documentation. I hope that, in the age of AI vibe-coding, people can build tools to convert materials from other renderers into Rayscaper, and vice versa.

When you apply a material in Rayscaper to any material in your SketchUp model, Rayscaper doesn’t replace the SketchUp material. Instead, it configures the existing SketchUp material using the parameters it reads from the material pack.

You can view the material packs that Rayscaper saves in the %%AppData%%/AssetCache folder (the exact path escapes me, I'm not at my PC right now).

Cheers,
Thomas

pixelcruncher

@Mike-Amos

I think my friend @majid requested that before as well He has a keen eye for this.

Given that the Twilight website is offline, is there a source where I can find these things? Maybe I can actually provide tools for using Twilight materials in Rayscaper, or at least the same templates.

pixelcruncher

@Krass I will have a look soon to help you out here, stay tuned.

Krass

are you both talking about Twilight render ?

pixelcruncher

@Krass said in Rayscaper New Releases:

are you both talking about Twilight render ?

Yes, @majid and @Mike-Amos are talking about Twilight render. But I'm not too familiar with it myself. But it seems to have a couple of dearly missed features?

Krass

Twilight render was great, but Rayscaper is marvelous compared to it.
I can give you the last version of Twilight

Mike Amos

Yep, trying to get to grips with the actual process or getting them back into the wild.

sashapepperspray

I think I figured something out about the blue material bug, I can make it happen in any file if I use the "edit texture in external editor" in the sketchup material editor, It shows up as blue.
(Another thing I noticed, is that If i edit a material in sketchup, it does not automatically update the material in rayscaper.)

pixelcruncher

I think I figured something out about the blue material bug, I can make it happen in any file if I use the "edit texture in external editor" in the sketchup material editor, It shows up as blue.

That's a good clue. I think it also has to do with SketchUp's colorized textures only. But I haven't looked at that part in depth.

(Another thing I noticed, is that If i edit a material in sketchup, it does not automatically update the material in rayscaper.)

This is by design; You should press the reload button in the Rayscaper material editor. I could add an "auto-sync" option to do this automatically. Rayscaper has a richer set of material capabilities than SketchUp. I assumed you want to edit the materials in Rayscaper, and that it would be counterproductive to override them from SketchUp repeatedly. Maybe that's not a reasonable workflow assumption.