Convert VRay 1 materials to VRay 2

eidam655

Hi everyone,

Question first - is there a way to quickly convert VRay 1 materials to VRay 2? Or 3?

This will probably be a blast from the past for the majority of you here, but you are my only hope, since apparently i can't search for things on the internet properly

A friend of mine has a setup that consists of SketchUp 8 and the old VRay 1.49. We are trying to convince her to upgrade to SU 2015 & VRay 2, but came across a curious problem - an interior render that took ~10 minutes in the older versions takes 100 minutes in the new one.

After a while I figured out that it is because of the materials that it's taking this long - when i recreated one material with the VRayBRDF layer the rendertime went down from 4 minutes to only 1, not much longer than a scene without any materials.

Before:

After:

So, my question is, is there a tool (or a simple, quick way) to convert the old materials to the newer version?

rv1974

there are 1.5 materials in this scene. The set-up from scratch would take a fraction of time you wasted to write this post.

andybot

Unfortunately, they've made it a bit of work to convert old scenes since they completely changed the way the engine (in particular the GPU engine) behaves with older materials. The CPU rendering seems to convert materials OK, but like you say, there can be a significant hit to render times. Rebuilding the materials as BRDF layers is really the only way forward. Sorry, you probably didn't want to hear that.

eidam655

OK, you're right, I didn't want to hear that, but if that's the only way, then I have no choice
I was just hoping it would have been simple to write a converter for the old materials, but that's just because I don't know much about the structure of the files.

Thanks for the answer.

andybot

@eidam655 said:

...write a converter for the old materials

It may be worth asking this request on the Chaos Group forums. Maybe they can figure out something that can write the old materials with the reflection and refraction layers into one BRDF layer. That would in fact be quite useful.

@unknownuser said:

Thanks for the answer.

You're welcome!