@thomthom said: Yes, V-Ray samples dark areas less. Is it suppose to be so dark? If note, I'd adjust the camera exposure - if you're using the Physical Camera. Thanks Thomthom for the exposure advice, I will check that out. Should I just up the samples then to cure the darker area blotchy effect? That area to the right of the scene is not supposed to be that dark. There are plenty of windows from that side of the room to illuminate the room in the actual house, so I'm trying to keep it consistent in the render. Chango, I will have to try your tip with larger plane lights. The only thing, when you use 'no decay' does that take away from a more realistic render? I was thinking about using point lights under the recessed can lights instead of small plane lights, I think that might give me a brighter render.

You can use my V-Ray Toys plugin. That will assist you to setting up matching views so they fit 100% when you merge V-Ray and SU exports. Follow the Plugins links in my signature.

thanks a bunch

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.

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

@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.

I'm experiencing the same problem (in SU Pro 7.1). The Options Window workaround has no effect whatsoever. A few changes stick (e.g, inversion of a bumpmap bitmap), most are lost, no matter if I open and close the options window and save and reload the model. Changes that get lost seem to be lost the very moment I hit Apply - the material preview doesn't change, and if I reopen the panel that I just closed values will already have reverted back to their initial state. This is a pretty serious and seriously galling bug to find in software with this pricetag!

well, everything was similar to what i posted just now, just different layers of information projected onto the terrain (villages, rivers, climate, woodland, etc.), nothing amazing really. The pure displacement map generated this: [image: 15hA_aramaio.jpg] (7 minute render)

What version of VfSU do you have? There's a SU bug with groups that makes them not render all the time. In the old version the only fix was to explode and regroup. In the new version all that's needed is to re-open the file.

When I need depth in my render I usually add the 'depth map' option in the framebuffer section of the render section and apply it in Photosoup. It might be a bit too dirty for your puristic renders, but it can get the job done quite fast and easy. Rendering real camera DOF is way more tedious (Asgvis should fix that inches bug by the way) and even then you really need to set your QMC values and color mapping values well to get nice grades in the depth. Not easy...

thomthom I opened the default opening template, resaved it and it doesn´t show anymore at the startup. thanks agrazdi

it seems to render glass fine if it is closed cube and all the faces are the right way around. ı know if it is a group it refracts the immage kind of funny. does it matter what i have painted on the SU model if i dont paint both sides with vray material?

sketchup 7.0 with the first version of vray 1.5 i dont think it was ever updated.

i believe it is a jpg file. i copy and paste the light fixture to a nother file and re link the material and it some times works. it might be to do with the light/alpha map being in a group.

I would definately use IR map for primary lighting and then Light cache for secondary. Use reinhard for your color mapping and adjust the burn value lower if you have overexposed areas of your rendering. For image sampling, I would start with adaptive QMC and if that is not getting you the amount of detail you desire, then switch to the"fixed" type and see how that works (this will probably increase rendering times a bit though). For your IR map, I would use a min of -3 and max rate of 0 with subdivides at 50 and samples 20. Those are for final quality settings and can be adjusted for tests. I just gave you those numbers to avoid having to explain the whole min and max concept, because it is kind of abstract and is better explained in the manual. Light cache settings are pretty much just controlled by the subdivs. Start with a value around 500 for tests and then got 1000-3500 for final and increas more if you still have a lot of noise. Make sure you have enough lights in the scene as well, so put lights inside of windows in addition to the sunlight. Hope this helps. Best of luck

Yea - DPI has no meaning without being accompanied by a width and height. (I I'm still amazed by advertising companies that makes the ads for out projects - asking me to send an image in 300dpi - without ever telling me the actual dimensions.)

Contact ASGVis support.

UPdate Ok everyone, so I have been working on the renders here at the office and I think that I pinpointed the problem. Under the sky material for the environment map, I accidently changed the Shadow Bias from 0 to 32, instead of changing the Shadow Subdivisions from 8 to 32. :X Oh well, its fixed now. I will upload pictures of the fixed renders when I finish them. Thanks for all the input!!!