First I want to thanks you guys who helped me, you are great! I used the group function and worked perfectly, so the function on EDIT SU materials... But still I have one last issue, as you can see on the image there is a fail between my grass and my floor...any hint to help me? Thanks very much! PS: do you guys think the grass is good looking? I lowered the scale, but its seems...different from a real grass :S [image: 2Yzo_aaaaaaaaaaaaaa.png]

With upcoming release v.1.3 Presto engine will use both GPU and CPU... @unknownuser said: Dear friends, a lot of you have already guessed what our next tech announcement will be and indeed it is about Presto running on both GPU and CPU. This announcement is probably among the most important ones in Thea Render tech achievements. Unifying GPU and CPU under the same (render) framework is not an easy job. With Thea Presto being written from scratch, we had the ambition, right from the beginning, to harvest all the computer power that is available. For coding Presto on the CPU, we didn't want just a "port" of the code from Nvidia CUDA architecture to x86/CPU architecture. We wanted to squeeze the CPUs to the max and see a real performance comparison between GPUs and CPUs. For this, we decided to adapt Intel's Embree library. What does this mean? with every GPU and CPU core running Presto, it means fast, very fast, rendering. And this fast rendering is coupled with Thea's material/light system. All in all, pure quality in the shortest render times! What is also quite interesting is the performance comparison between GPUs and CPUs. We have modeled four scenes specifically for this purpose and ran the benchmarks on various machines (our own plus beta tester machines). It is very nice to see that CPUs stay up to their task and bring a significant speed boost. The actual relative performance between GPUs and CPUs depends heavily on the system and scene type. [image: IBJr_CausticsBenchmarkLiveScreenshot.jpg] Actually, to our knowledge, Thea Presto is a unique engine that makes it possible to compare GPUs and CPUs under the same render framework with performance maxed out for both architectures, in a systematic way*. You are welcome to download the detailed benchmark pdf document attached with this post. Best wishes Disclaimer: the comparison between the GPUs and CPUs is only made within Thea Presto framework and does not imply any kind of general performance superiority of a specific processor/architecture. More benchmarks and discussion at related topic http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17%26amp;t=13779

try contacting support@chaosgroup.com

I also have this question. The old version scene cann't render correctly in 2.0 version. Use "Regenerate all Vray materials" can solve the question, but that would lose old vray materials settings.

Check in Vray options under "Global Switches" to see if override materials is turned on.

I've seen that problem as well. Try using TT Vray Toys plugin. It will initially load SU without Vray, so open your model, go to the plugin and load Vray and Voila you are good to go.

it works! thank you jiminy-billy, it solves my endless problems. haha

check your memory usage. SketchUp is a 32bit process, so if you get close to 4gb of ram being used, you're going to get a crash. One day SketchUp will join the 64bit world, and this won't be a problem. Until then, try to keep RT renders in lower resolutions if you can.

Yeah, do as Devin suggests and try the light subdivs first. The other thing is that you are 1.48 which is a pretty outdated version. Not sure if this would change things, but I would consider the upgrade to 2.0

@daniel said: Are there more gems? Yes. And there seems to be new ones coming out all the time. I don't think anyone mentioned LightUp - the guy who developed it, Adam(?) is a member of Skechucation. If you go to the Gallery there is a "Render Application Homepages" thread that list quite a few. Also, if you can find a bookstore that carries the trade magazines 3D Artist and 3D World, you can find additional information - and in the descriptions of all the renderings they will list what software was used to create them. I think you will often find that the price of the software is commensurate with how many bells and whistles it has. You'll just have to determine what you want it to do and how much your willing to pay (or save up for) for that. Yes, LumenRT and Lumion are both expensive, but as you say they look very attractive. I had planned on saving up for Lumion, but EON Software offered me a very good deal on LumenRT, and so far I am pleased with it - it is easy and very fast. It appears to operate very similar to Lumion. I probably don't have to tell you that you need to make sure your computer meets the system requirements for whatever software you end up getting. Great post. Thank you. I already had a look at LightUp a while ago and the realtime walkthrough appeared to be quite useful in my eyes, and also very unique. Then I found some other renders with realtime walkthrough and realized how little I know about the current features of renders. Thats why I created this thread. I browsed through the thrad you recommended and think I have a good overview now. At the moment I am going to choose one render that does not cost too much to start learning. This means I will probably try Twilight, LightUp, Kerkythea and maybe LuxRender and choose one of them. As soon as I "mastered" the chosen software I am probably going for something like Thea or Vray. And if I am not satisfied after leaning those or need more features etc. I am going to look at something like Vue, Lumion, Artlantis oder LumenRT. I really love the feature videos but I do not think that it is smart to start off with such an advanced render. Thank you very much for taking the time to help me. @numerobis said: @daniel said: Looking in the trade magazines, most professional architectural illustrators seem to favor 3DS Max, but it costs an arm, 2 legs, and your first born.[/attachment] Max comes with Mental Ray... but you don't need to buy a feature packed app like Max, if the only thing you want is the renderer. Lumion is nice for exterior animations, but not for interiors. The current GI quality is a joke. And you can't compare the level of realism to full GI renderes like Maxwell or V-Ray. The material system in Lumion is very limited. But it all depends on your needs... for fast exterior animations Lumion looks quite good. Thank you for your input too. I will keep in mind that Lumion may be the better choice if I need a good solution for exterior animations. As for Mental Ray, i totally agree with you. I think Max is a great software. But for me it is far too complicated and I think you can do many of the things you can do in Max with Sketchup plugins too if you know how. Best regards niX.

Thanks! I will check them out.

I've had similar issues with creating vray proxys. I've exported the vrmesh from 3ds max, imported into sketchup via vray, then apply textures to the proper materials. Then I save that SU file as "tree 1.skp" or whatever. I usually have no problem opening this file later and rendering - the textures/materials are still showing up. However, when I'm working in another scene and import that same SU file with the proxy, the textures will not consistently render. When I sample the materials of the proxy, the texture shows up in the SU material editor for about a second, then it disappears, it seems like the vray material editor which has lost the link to the texture overwrites the SU material - so it defaults to a solid color. Not sure that helps, I could be doing something wrong but in the end I need to place proxies without re texturing all the time. Chuck

Sorry being an idiot, had accidentally deleted the source files. Doh!!!

he has been beta testing through the entire development process, so I would assume it's a 2.0 render.

Were you testing 1.6? If so, I would think that because 2.0 is really the final release of 1.6 beta, you have used up the 30 days already. You might be able to contact chaos and ask for an extension to fully test 2.0 I would think.