Sometimes the path that a mac saves to will default to a recently used folder. Try a spotlight search of your file name, and will probably show you the folder it is defaulting to. I change my paths with a great little program call Onyx. But I'm sure a mac user on the forum can give you the OSX method.

cheers for the help guys! i defintely feel a lot more clued up on it now! i guess i would be right in saying that there isn't really one use for it, it's one of those all in one programs. would you agree solo? uv unwrapping and exporting in different formats is defintely very cool, maybe i'll research little bits of this softwware at a time! i did e-mail right hemisphere (the people who wrote deep exploration) asking what it's primay function is, when they get back to me i shall let you all know what they say! pav

Thanx Thomthom and Holmes for your help, appreciate it. You actually dont need to play around with the alpha -in Environment tab in BOTH the Sky and background tabs, choose bitmap and place your HDRI. choose environment as opposed to Texture on the top Put your physical camera off and render! you'll probably need to adjust your blur and multiplier values, as your first rendering will most likely be too dark or too light and blurry. Jorge Barrero's 'V-Ray for SketchUp Tutorial - Sun & Sky - Beginner' on Youtube explains it nicely. thanx again If ever you guys are in South Africa give a shout, my email: neospace.studio@gmail.com

I believe it is only for Max various versions.

align, it depends a lot on what your intentions and occupation are. if you are an architect or designer, hence the focus of your work is the design, you would be better off with one of the applications that demand a short learning curve and that are easy to operate. i am talking of podium, twilight, irender, kerkythea, idx renditioner, indigo, pov-ray, etc. however, if you are an ilustrator or work in the visualization field, you might want more control to achieve super-hyper-realism. then it is probably worth – i say probably as you can achieve exceptional results with any of the apps i just mentioned – having a go at the likes of vray, maxwell, modo and others of the same caliber. but never forget solo's wise warning: rendering is at best 50% to do with the app you use. the rest is up to the artist in charge.

Hi B uttlamo, With su 6, you can always go to Google's official site and download the pro version: http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60107 If you don't have a license for it, it will gracefully downgrade to the functionalities of the free version and from then on function like free after the 8 hours of trial working time.

I have only tried it once but I had great results! I exported my model as Collada .dae

Cheers Thomthom Thats perfect, I have abit of experimenting to do.

Another solution : Use Twilight for render the Mover animation! You will have a perfect quality but maybe a longer timer to render By Ecuadorian

Cheers I will look into it.

oh nice! it makes them very fast too ok, i think i have enough new info to experiment with for a little while.. i'm sure i'll have some more questions in the future thanks so much for the help so far!

@andybot said: It's the "size" value in 2.0. Default is 1.0, that's what you want to increase to get soft shadows. Okay, I'll try it when I get back to PC. Thanks for answering. One more thing, is there any way I can export just the shadows from vray render? I can export raw shadows from native sketchup Jpeg exports but have no idea how to export shadows from vray. I believe that making blurry shadows in vray will increase rendering times, so I am thinking of doing it in photoshop with the "shadow only" export. Still not sure what technique exactly will save my time when I have just one PC for the job.

@zimmerkl said: Yeah grass was added in photoshop, my bump map seemed to be crashing SU. Bump? You don't mean displacement? Displacing large surfaces will eat up lots of ram. Large faces should be sub-divided into smaller pieces.

There's also Mirillis Action! https://mirillis.com/game-recorder and OBS recorder, which I personally use, but weren't mentioned in the thread. Also, there's Xsplit, Movavi - I heard a lot of them, mostly good opinions. But if anyone is looking for a free screen recorder, I think OBS is the best option.

@pixero said: Unity (and others) may not look as good but at least they have the possibility to make a presentation available thru a webpage or an exe that can be put on a cd. I couldn´t agree more. I actually got kind of carried away discussing something that actually has more to do with game modding than with presentation itself.

@adamb said: And lets not forget LightUp which will do realtime Insolation analysis based on Geolocation and give Kwh/m^2/day for tracking and non-tracking surfaces. Adam I was thinking about LightUp for this purpose Adam. I wonder should you consider going down the 'Energy' road with LightUp as it would appear that you would have the foundations laid! Its all above my head unless its put forward in a simple and straight forward package which Open Studio would not appear to be If you need guinea pigs for such a development process I am sure that the architects and engineers here would be more than willing to work with you. For me, while pretty pictures are nice, getting the Green element right is far more important Mike

We have released new versions of IRender nXt which fix this problem. Thanks for your help Chris.

I have played around with the settings and think the ones that most achieve a SketchUp 'lookalike' are 'Cad Optimized Lights' which I think is the default and 'Shaded Illustration'. I attach some screen shots of where the settings are along with a sample, Corner Cubby. Mike Corner Cubby.pdf [image: jfqk_CadOptimizedLights.jpg] [image: xOWN_ShadedIllustration.jpg]

It seems that the world is full of patent trolls nowadays. I think I'll go ahead and patent all my wild ideas so I'll be able to sue a few multinationals some years from now. Back to discussion, I bought, downloaded and installed Vue Pioneer's RenderUp module in Windows 7. So I switched to XP to see how automatic the synchronization would be. This is the result: [image: pAl3_vue8.jpg] I still have to figure out how to get the same module in XP. All I've been able to get is error messages. I guess their licensing system is not perfect after all. UPDATE: The message I posted went away after entering my e-mail and password again. Now I understand it works pretty much like Windows Live Messenge. And about the module, E-on gives you the option to download and keep an installer for each module. Even if you're such a clueless guy that you lose the downloaded installer, they allow you to download it again, up to five times.