Hello, take a look at this vismat library. Maybe something for you...

vray.com was purchased by someone that has NOTHING to do with Chaos Group, V-Ray, ASGvis, etc. They are just a reseller like the rest of the resellers out there. ASGvis also distributed it's products via resellers, but in addition to that, sold the products it made itself. This was unfair for our resellers though, and caused a lot of complications. Product creation and product sales are often separated, although it's less common in the world of software, it's still a common practice. We aren't really set up to handle worldwide sales, taxes, shipping, etc. That's all unnecessary overhead, which can be handled by local resellers much more efficiently. To purchase our product, we recommend you use our website to locate a local reseller that can help you. It's not realy complicated, all you have to do is click the Purchase button at the top of our site, and then choose V-Ray for SketchUp from the drop down list. (or click this link: http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/purchase.html?pID=10). People often get confused and think that vray.com is part of Chaos Group... I really wish that company hadn't decided to use or product's name for their domain name... that is a very sneaky and misleading way of attracting business.

Might be worthwhile to look through Brodie's posts. I seem to recall he was explaining some of his workflow for the maxwell competition a little while back.

Looks like some sort of bug. Managed to recreate it too. If you load a bitmap as a spherical sky, everything is correct. [image: dpJ8_AlmostBlack.png]

That dialog has really changed the way I work. My favorite is that you can edit the segments of an arc or circle after its created.

To map a texture like that to a sphere you'll need to use a plugin such as Whaat's UVTools. http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=23725

The little "m" button stands for editing the map of that item. Besides, I found that you don't have to turn the whole sun off, making the whole result dark. You onlt have to get inside the sun map, and turn off shadow

Hi Brodie, tx the winner is http://www.architectenweb.nl/aweb/redactie/photo.asp?iNID=28741&PhotoID=229015 I think they won because of their strong conceptual sketches. We focussed a lot on the building itself. A mistake we often make. Its often better to set a design into its environment with a visionary conceptual idea. No need to render or get a lot of CAD involved. Our design has a lot of thought going into details, materials and techniques. Too much maybe. But we the jury told us they had a hard time choosing between us and the one who has won. The building itself is just a pumphouse and a hotwater barrel of about 16m. height and 22m diameter. Francois

Any displacement in your model? That might be it.

I'll give your tips with subdividing the geometry a try. I messed around with the displacement subdivs and the edge lengths etc already and took it all the way down to 32subdivs. Seemed to provide the best level of detail vs speed. 16 just looked liked a mess although it rendered fast. Instead of doing the whole render with displacement I took to the old trick of rendering the LC and IR passes without it on, saved them, ran them from file for the final render with the displacement on. Still took a while but much faster than calculating the LC and IR with the displacement on. I hope that it is just a kink and they are planning on ironing out how vfsu handles CPU management with displacements once Chaos Group decides vfsu is worth their time again.

Nope. Pack and Go is a request in the next release.

Good.

@rspierenburg said: You could try this material for the metal. thanks so much ill give it a try

That is correct. I hear a lot of folks use it for interiors, if they have the time to let it cook. It does produce some nice grainy results. Perfect for what I am looking to do.

not that I'm aware of. CG certainly doesn't provide it. Don't know where you would legitimately find it. Why wouldn't you just ask to transfer your license of your current version once you have your new machine set up? I've had to do that and it's really not a hassle.

Thanks for your help with this, it worked!

@valerostudio said: Stay away from 3D CrapHouse models.

There is no converter that will do this. Your best bet is to find a similar material already made in .vismat format and swap out the maps that come with the materials you are trying to convert.