Use Maxwell Z-Clipping instead of SketchUp section planes for the type of scene you have shown -- this works, always has. Best, Jason.

One thing that is important to keep in mind when using MXM files within SketchUp is the type of tiling that the creator of the MXM file specified. There are 2 types of tiling possible: Relative and Meters. The basic idea is that Meters (which used to be known as "RealScale" in older versions of Maxwell) allows the creator to set up the MXM texture(s) to tile at a specific real-world size... this requires the UVs for that object to be 1 meter X 1 meter. The way this is accomplished inside SketchUp is via the Maxwell>UV Coordinates context menu -- here you choose your UV projection type (Cubic/Planar/Spherical/Camera) and set the projection size to 1 meter. [image: ksQe_maxwellUV.jpg] However if the MXM is set up to tile using Relative (typically with a value of 1 and 1) it will automatically tile at the scale and aspect ratio of the UVs created inside SketchUp. The easiest way to control this is to choose one of the texture images used in the MXM and create a new SketchUp material (setting the scale in the SketchUp material to whatever you want as your final). Unfortunately, often without MXED you will not know if the MXM is set to Meters or Relative tiling, and as you can see you would take very different actions in SketchUp to get proper results. Best, Jason.

So excited about this!

Thanks for all the helpful replies guys! After some more tweaking and fumbling around I think I have got it to the stage where it's kinda working. [image: gyNl_GradientGlass.JPG] Thanks for all the uploaded material files. They really helped me to see what was actually happening!

@archigrafix said: Yes very interesting option...hope other softwares will soon get this. Anyway I find indigo is still a little expensive IMO The RT version costs less than 100 Euros (until 23.11.), I think it is not very expensive compared to others?!

Yep! Got it. Thanks guys. Its always the simple little things that take a week to figure out.

@adamb said: Thanks for the heads up! I've added an annotation on the video noting the different key for Windows. Adam Cheers Adam, really enjoying this lightup, going to be playing with it all day to learn the ins and outs,

@iichiversii said: Ok that worked Rich, so what was wrong with my PNG ? and what should i have done to make it work? Perhaps what you've done is export the texture and done "save as" a PNG. Which converts it to a PNG file. But the embedded Material texture you had before that went red (named "TREE(1).PNG") was actually a jpeg with a misleading extension. but glad you've resolve it! Adam

But in terms of the model I posted, the texture has black and white lines - the most extreme color values you can get. You'd think that was enough contrast for the threshold to trigger higher samples?

@thomthom said: But I haven't been rendering with Alpha. It's been all without. I had a chance to look at it some more. You're right, alpha was not on - but it still rendered areas without geometry as black. I tried the "z-depth catcher" plane - and it does work in making the background white. I did a quick check- and if the plane is beyond the rear clipping distance, it still shows up as white, so I assume that anything that's clipped by vray is drawn as white, but anything transparent is shown as black. I agree that it's really not an optimal situation. It should clip the foreground to black, the background to white, and draw transparency as white (to assume that you are looking at the back distance...)

Darn, the good ones are always taken!! lol Thanks again for your help Jason. Anita

It very much depends on the direction your light is shining from. The more perpendicular your light source is to your surface, the more washed out your bump map will be. If you have your light closer to parallel, you'll get a more raking light and show up your surface texture much better. Can you post an image perhaps?

I'm sorry to say that I just don't think the “Draft” engine is up to the task of a scene like this – I tried a bunch of things, and there were some issues, but fixing them had little impact of the draft engines output... at the end of the day the draft engine still can't clear the noise within a reasonable time/SL. [image: HYEZ_ChandellierWithNoGlass_draftSL18.jpg] If this is the type of scene you need to render often I think it really is going to be needful to use the production engine – which can do it no problem (see attached example). [image: DeG5_ChandellierWithNoGlass_prodSL14.jpg] On the off chance you want to know what I tried here is a description of what I changed (and the updated file): ChandellierWithNoGlass_jmods.zip After taking a look at the file I started to make some edits – the first thing I did was remove any geometry that wasn't needed for the render. Partially because this helps me get my bearings and find flaws but also because this makes the SketchUp file more compact. I made quite a few geometry changes and you can look at those and decide for yourself... most notably the chandelier and the rug. Then I started looking at the Maxwell settings – in particular the camera settings were very unrealistic. You had it set for an EV of 1 – for interiors a EV of 5-7 is more normal. Once I set the EV to 5 to get the camera exposure more natural I adjusted the materials – I added 2 materials: “jason emitter” and “jason emitter plane”. I used the first for the “bulbs” of the chandelier and the the second was used on a plane I set behind the camera to be used as a “fill light”. Other than that I made some tweaks to the various materials looking for too bright colors or materials using textures which were too bright. I was careful to use the entity info palette and remove any conflicting materials – meaning if the group level had one material assigned but the subgroup level had another (the table set was an example of this). I changed the wall and ceiling into my “painted wall” material, which you can download here: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=349725#p349725 Sorry I can't give you better news. Best, Jason.

Hi, Really interesting, thanks a lot for this (old) thread That's a part of the solution for my (old) problem https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=71894 now, i know how to write with Ruby X*Y on my unique component. Ideally, i would like to do something like that https://sketchucation.com/forums/download/file.php?id=158092&t=1 But as i don't know Ruby ... and i'm absolutely not a developper I think i can do a small modification of this to do just this but i don't know where to begin, to do this, i would like to select my components, so that the extension count the number of instance so that it write number * Length (X for horizontal or Z for vertical ... or Y following component axis for inclined plane for example) i think i can find information to draw a line adapted to the bounding box ... (in "Automatic Sketchup" by Matthew Scarpino) ... how to position the leader and the text (in the same book) ... maybe how to draw the rectangle around the bounding box while creating another layer ... ("Automatic Sketchup" by Matthew Scarpino too ?) but i don't now where to find how to write Number * Length with text i found something about it here https://ruby.sketchup.com/Sketchup/Selection.html#count-instance_method it's the beginning, the solution is near ? Can you help me please ? Thanks Best regards

cool! these trees look good... thanks for the link! best V

@dkendig said: I hope you get up to speed in time for beta to start. The next version has a bit more pep in it's step. yes looking forward....

Quick question to the OP. Did you use the same vismat for both instances? The reason I ask is because I know that there have been some issues using older vismats with the newer version of the VRaySU. You could try re-building your material from scratch in the newer version to see if that works better. Rob