I'll try to explain clamping to get things started. Maybe others will chime in. Although since it rendered OK before, I don't know why it wouldn't be OK now. In any image, there is a range of colors from black to white. Let's say the colors go from 0 to 255, right? Well, your camera may only be able to handle a range of 240 colors, so you could set the exposure to see 0-239 or 15-255. In the latter case, if there are areas of subtle shadows, you'd lose detail because the camera can't see it. In the former case, if there are bright areas of white or almost white, all that will get washed out. In your case, this is what is happening. If you have the colors clamped, anything from 240-255 is shown as white. If you unclamp the colors, the Vray frame buffer represents 240-255 with solid colors from yellows to reds to black. If you don't want any part of your image burned, then you need to adjust your exposure like you did until there is no difference between toggling the color clamping on/off. I'm not quite sure what you mean by: @unknownuser said: ...but when I increase the exposure (at -0.27 its TOO dark), the SAME AREAS where the bad reflections appear, also appear when I turn the Clamped Colors layer/mask of the render window. Can you post some images?

Your buildings seem to need some visual or physical transition from hardscape to softscape. Your edges seem they need softening to better resemble reality, unless the builders in your region cut everything with lasers.

@aceshigh said: @thomthom said: The default settings for displacement is view dependant - ( displaced edge size depend on view ). never really understood what this means. To displace a mesh it's subdivided by V-Ray. Default settings in V-Ray is to adjust the subdivision based on the view. So mesh closer to the camera is subdivided more than mesh further away. @aceshigh said: does that mean I should create different groups with each face? Or that its enough that I divide the faces with lines? Meaning that instead of using a 10x10 meters face, its better that I use a 10x10 meters MESH made of several 25cm sized triangles? Displacement eats up memory. If you have a large face V-Ray must hold on to memory for that entire face all in one chunk. But, if you split it into smaller pieces V-Ray can let go of some of the memory once it has processed each of the smaller pieces. You can find tips and hints if you search for displacement and memory management. I'll probably explain it better than what I can do. And I think (I might be making it up ) that V-Ray prefer triangulated mesh for displacement.

hi,... Maybe this will help!... Here in Portugal, usually we designate wood oak in two separate spicies, you should try to find FRENCH OAK and AMERICAN OAK (Carvalho Frances e Carvalho Americano) Pardon mi Ingles! lolol Best of luck! Miguel

Not from within SU. But as mentioned further up there are free uv mapping tools out that work with whaat's uv tool. Best there is, but could be something in the future

Okey Perhaps the file that never show upp in the answer before understand what I mean? ROPE.skp That you see its not so hard, and Iam not good at neither scripting or english:P. This is better than having physics joints in every link that take a lot of the computer:P

I agree about 2 point perspective especially from this angle. or just use free transform in photoshop to fake it. and car seems to stand out too much, its about the building not what's parked outside! i think even moving it further away from the camera would be better. is this an artlantis render? yeah some more detail and its gonna be great. also, try not to use a glass that is so warped. good work though, looking forward to seeing more.

Would a dynamic component work with random attribute built into it. But when you take your first instance and copy it to other locations, I don't know if it re-calculates the random#. I haven't really used the random feature before. But I can see where it would be nice to quickly click on component instances and have it randomly replaced with a component from a specific list. At the start of the ruby it could ask for names of components to include in the list, or maybe the ruby is written for rubys with specific prefix in their name.

If all of your faceme objets have shadows that fall onto a flat surfaces (vs. hitting walls, steps, etc.) then maybe you could make a dynamic component with two sub components. One sub-component is the face me object and it faces the camera. The other sub-component is a fake shadow. It is the same object but with translucent gray fill and it is on the ground. Then this would be set to face the sun vs. camera, and ideally would set the length of this to scale based on the hight of the sun angle. Maybe an alternative is to swap out your face me objects for real 3d objects just before exporting to Vray. If you don't like the look of these 3d objects you could always make a duplicate rendering with your faceme components and layer in Photoshop to mask these back in. You would just have to make sure the faceme objects are slightly larger than the 3d objects, and you run into issues of seeing the same object from multiple views, don't know how Vray deals with that and faceme objects.

maybe that's a job for beer exploration pav

here is my scene... if you were lucky following the video tutorial, please, modify my scene and upload again so I can see where I screwed up... piscina.skp

thank you all... I wish someone would compile a thread with all (or most) plugins ever created, with small animations of what they do, just like the Must Have Rubys Visual Index, but BIGGER

Try NOT leaving the layers panel open. Turn on the Layers toolbar instead. And then ALWAYS stay on layer 0. And model things on zero, then turn everything into groups and components. And then move those onto the desired layer through the layer toolbar. That way you never change from layer 0. But you can move components and groups easily onto the correct layer. I like to do it that way, Chris Oh, and its still possible to get raw geometry to change layers accidentally. So then I use TIG's move all geometry to layer 0 plugin. It moves all loose geometry to layer 0, while leaving all components and groups on the layer they are on.

Didier Bur's plugin: [Plugin] Very fast texture writer http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=6386&p=156132&hilit=Very+fast+texture+writer#p40025

@runnerpack said: Also, some way of showing which material is selected would be handy... (but not in a floating window for obvious reasons ) I could draw the name of the material to the viewport, as well as a sample of the colour (but not texture).

Hide them! ...or soften them, then select a surface with a single click. [image: WeZH_Styles-1.jpg]

There are some specific programs to do that. Probably you are on PC and I'm mac user but specially many photo-stitching softwares have the hability to correct linear and non linear perspectives automatically. The Photoshop method described above is OK too but with a little more of hand work. You can take a look at some topographic GIS software too. There are a lot of open source programs to make orthographical corrections to aerial photos and perspectives that needs to play with earth curvature and camera views like you described so may be capable to transform cilindrical distortions. In fact, Google needs this kind of programs to construct most of their 3d maps. If you will need to replicate this process many times I think it could be a good solution as you can even process many buildings at the same time.

Thats some photo!

@honoluludesktop said: Is "MOI" a solid modeler? The one I am familiar with has the ability to merge or subtract volumes. My guess is that SU could never do that as long it is a surface modeler. I'm not sure if I misunderstand what you're asking but BoolTools by Whaat does merge and subtract operations.

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