Good idea, thanks Aerilius for sharing

MALAISE

@phmeier said:

Oh sorry ,,, my mistake .. well in this image tha trees are not part from the hdri they´re 2d trees located at the other side of the street .. The hdri is basiclly a bkue sky with clouds and mountains .. ive tryied another ones tih houses .. but all of them just reflect a small part in a big scale ..

I will try this dome thing !!! But anyway ,, is there a way to reduce or map how it will reflect !?!

In general "no" - an HDRI needs to cover the entire universe. However there may be some tools to help you create a HDRI by repeating a smaller pattern.

You might also try some full HDRi skies from the web, such as this one:

http://www.hdrmill.com/PanoramaThumbnails/Free%20Samples/SunnyRenoSuburb01.jpg

Free HDRi Skies

https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/simlab-solidworks-importer-sketchup

thanks adam but I have sorted it now, I was to impatient to render and started asking questions before trying harder myself first lol. I managed to fix it and your right about it not matching up. Thanks for the help anyway.

@redot said:

Thank you so much for this Nomeradona.
I'm looking forward to trying it out.
good to know...

Thank you all. The call for this beta is closed now. It will take a moment until all ~200 applications are proceeded, but you will be contacted by email, when selections are done. Further information on Thea Render forum.

@unknownuser said:

... Probably a small number (20 at most) distributed uniformly among all modeling applications.

After this (short) period of closed beta testing, an open beta will appear where everyone can see our progress and evaluate Thea Render.

best wishes
Ioannis Pantazopoulos

@earthmover said:

...I can vouch that these plants and trees are really good quality and good resolution.

Yes, I think so did the plants imported from the RLA in SketchUp, instead of being a model skp pull it, because in the program RLA whole model glue together and not under command, renders the possibility is not very good, although the plants are really good ...

Examples:

http://s56.radikal.ru/i154/0908/10/4baedcaade93t.jpg

http://i049.radikal.ru/0908/d1/9df814d13d1ct.jpg

@thomthom said:

What V-Ray for Sketchup do you have? The original - or one of the service packs?

Have you downloaded the manual for the version you have?

this is the manual that i downloaded sir: http://www.scribd.com/doc/7253631/VRay-for-SketchUp-Manual i dont know what version this manual is for.. nothings written about the version, but i can somehow keep up with it now. 👍

Here's my image background.

I dunno...Autodesk has become to big and they have the ability to buy themselves out of any stalemate.

They own pretty much all the big names in the CG industry like Max, maya, XSI, flint, Flame, Alias etc. but that being said the world is a changing place, take Microsoft for example, they are aiming at creating the best search engine and Google has it's sights on the best Operating system 😒

They have re-written the core to work on Macs and are currently back-porting that core to PC. Alpha/beta testing in progress. Will see if that addresses it.

@unknownuser said:

Vray is almost $800 and Max, well, if you think that paying the price of a used car for software is worth it, then go right ahead. Right now for a starter that's too much for my blood.

A quick Google search and I found Vray for SU for $720 at Novedge. I bought me a home license before the summer at a campaign price from somewhere for about $650 so its not THAT much more expensive. But if time is no restrain for you go with Maxwell...great images but takes forever to render.

Don't forget there are some great free renderers like Kerkythea thats most likely a whole deal better than IDX.
I can say I have tried them all and to me the important aspects are: Image quality, speed, workflow and ability to handle complex scenes without choking.
My advice is to go with a free renderer if your new to rendering. Then as you find it too limited for your needs go for a better one.
No renderer is better than its user. And to me as a professional user speed is one of the mayor factors to be able to deliver on time. Or for citing Electric Image renderers old slogan: Render fast, retire young.

@unknownuser said:

By the way Pixero, that's a nice rendering... You did this in Max? How long did it take you to model it? Nice flower and outdoor space.

Thats Vray and Sketchup. I'll try to post a lowres version of the animation once its done.

@unknownuser said:

Yeah, I think when I finish putting together my new machine I will eventually look at VRay for my personal higher end renderer. Is it easy to use? That one I have not tried yet.

I cant really comment on if its easy or not. That depend on your prior knowledge. I find it quite easy, but then again others don't.

That's not a crash - just unresponsive.

My guess is that you have material applied to group/components. That will cause allot of extra processing for VfSU. For optimal performance you should ONLY apply materials to faces.

@thomthom said:

@edmon242004 said:

Yes Vray fur, but there is no fur in Vray SU,, come to think of it why is it not included in this version of Vray? Could be quit useful.. 👍

It wasn't supported in the VRay SDK when ASGVis made the current version. Now everything is availible in the SDK, I think. VfSU2 might feature fur. Might.

@nomeradona said:

one of the gfreat concern is the amount of polygons involve. and we know SU has difficultry in handling huge poly.

Doesn't most 3D app with fur support only represent fur with a few low poly proxies?
SU might not even need to generate geometry - just have a tool you enable to see and broom the fur.
yeap if vray proxy will be supported then vray fur will come handy. O.T> Is there any chance of you working with damien to develop his fur with Vray SU sice you know the language of Ruby and Damien has no desire to learn it.

Do you need to pay for the exporter or is there a trail version?

try turning your resolution down to the lowest setting. Errant stuff will usually reappear. That is what brought back a missing RPTools menu on my old machine.

Hey guys, thanks for all the input.

Rob, thanks for all the advice.

1)By default in VRay GI is set on. I changed some of the parameters for a softer shadow.I changed the size from 1 to 2, and the shadow subdiv from 20 to 32.
2) For the sky dome, are you talking about HDRI? or are you just talking about placing a background image. How would I go about doing that and where could I acquire spherical images that would work?
3) I didn't get to the window frames and other minor details at the point of rendering that image, but I will certainly get to that! 😄

Tom, so your saying that for displacement to work, no other geometry can be touching the object? Even if it is grouped/made component? How would I get around this? On this next image I believe my displacement worked. I elevated the counter 1/4" from the stone island as well as the BBQ, so then only thing that it is coming in contact with is the ground, but it appeared to work.

Secondly, just wanted to say that I got the water to work. Found the right combo of adjusted parameters to get that semi transparent, bluish tint and got the displacement to work also. (I think I just had the size to high to notice any change. It was at 300 and I brought it down to 5 and it was perfect. I put it to 300 only because I saw in a tutorial that the guy did that, so...)

Anyway, here is a picture of my progress, slowly but surely. I did want to ask a few more things, that is if you all don't mind.

How to get a more realistic brushed metal material. What type of material I should do for the BBQ, if you don't think that the stone I used is good. (Keep in mind the new material has to match with the redish brick facade of the house.)

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c319/sav_phili/House%20-%20KL/test_render08.jpg

Thanks for your time and help!!!

Steve

@thomthom said:

Emissive materials should not be used as primary light source. Use omni or rectangular lights as primary.

Thanks ThomThom ! 😄

It helps me too, because I tried this http://sketchupvrayresources.blogspot.ca/2011/07/trick-removing-splotches-in-vray.html

But it's still the same!

Now with a rectangular light it's really better.

hi i fixed it ...

i had removed the examples/utilities from plugins by mistake somehow 😠 ...

idx requires them