FYI: pre-sale of the next VfSU - $200 off

thomthom

Old users will get the upgrade for free. But new ones got lots to save here.
I'm testing the beta and it's shaping up real good. Gotten rids of lots of quicks an oddities. The workflow will be much more smoother.

From the announcement http://software.asgvis.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=ASGVIS-INTRODUCES-NEW-V-RAY-FOR-GOOGLES-SKETCHUP-NOW-AVAILABLE-FOR-THE-FIRST-TIME-ON-MAC-OS.html&Itemid=625

@unknownuser said:

• NEW! More Shader Types (great for metal textures!)
• NEW! More than 10 new Procedural Textures, including Dirt (for more realistic renderings!)
• NEW! Lights now have the ability to add IES profiles (for Light Accuracy)
• NEW! Material can now be layered better
• NEW! Faster Scene Processing Times
• NEW! Support for SketchUp Transparency and Alpha Transparency

My favourites are:

Disappearing group bugs is gone
Images now render without exploding
Applying materials to groups/components doesn't affect parsing time or smoothing like it does now in the current version (really big workflow improvement!)
VfSU will read the alpha channel of PNG and TGAs
And V-Ray material settings now follows the SU materials. So you can create components with pre-setup materials which will be imported with the component. And you can copy and paste between models as you wish. Great, great improvement.
Ambient Occlusion! Really helps to pick out the details.

...ok - it's a long list of favourites. considering this started out as a rewrite to post it to Mac - it's amazing that they offer this upgrade for free to new users. But shhh! don't give them ideas!