OK. I was just explaining the reason behind my alternative approach. YMMV
the illumination levels still depend on the sun intensity setting and HDRI multiplier either way.

@thomthom said:

@andybot said:

I was thinking construction plane would be helpful

Work Plane v2.3 by TIG?

right! sorry, was just going off the top of my head... guess where that was...

Well, the issue is with reflections. I went back to the original model I was testing, and it was an issue of reflections, not lighting levels. If your background is too bright or too dark, you won't see the reflection of your environment map, or you might see too much. The blend helps control reflections only. Hope that is of some use.

yes, tools on surface is great, but doesn't address the snapping issue, nor trying to draw a line in space. I was thinking construction plane would be helpful, but again you run into inferencing for something just off-axis.

@hellnbak: One thing I was thinking was - couldn't you just change your axis temporarily to align, or is this a whole series of non-orthogonal lines?

I take that back about the environment background slot... doesn't actually work the way I thought. To get the blend right you have to adjust two variables:

GI multiplier for the HDRI
sun intensity for the texsky

Just like in Fernando's tutorial

That's where conversations like this are useful It gives everyone more information to help in making their own decisions. Everyone will value these multiple things differently: quality, speed, ease of use, price, etc.

Thanks Jason for your efforts. I wasn't sure how to do the transparent material, anything transparent automatically gets a reflection - fine if everything transparent is glass... but I didn't know how to get rid of that so I changed it to plastic material with rough finish...
It's interesting to see this compared to the 5-10 minute vray output... just sayin' - if time is money, well, vray pays for itself pretty quickly!

Though I do have to say the RT view with Maxwell is pretty good and does save time.

not quite - you can use a blend for the environment BG Color (physical sky and HDRI.) This way you can use regular GI for the GI color, and then turn on default lights in the Global switches for the sun shadows.

with the other method, you don't get lighting from the HDRI...

well, yes, move and rotate are pretty basic things to learn, I agree. It can be very tedious sometimes, which is why the align plugin is great. But of course you have to know the basics first...

thanks for the explanation

I understood him to mean "position relative to something else" not sketchup "orient faces" as in back/front...

@massimo said:

@unknownuser said:

Massimo - less than a minute out of 30 is essentially the same time...

Absolutely, but you have a lot less noise so it will require more time with the previous preset in order to have the same clean output no?

Well, that's just me not being familiar with the presets. Why is the 10 setting more noisy than the 09??

jason, good tips. Thanks!

Massimo - less than a minute out of 30 is essentially the same time...

How curious - I ran the preset 09 - I got 40 passes in the same time - so no speed difference, but interestingly, the noise went way down...
Anwyay, it's sort of academic, since I only have used twilight because of its quick biased presets and the ability to use it for rendering animation.

there's an align plugin...

Just curious - is there a way to control the blue-ishness of the twilight output. That's one things that's bothered me that I can't seem to figure out. With vray and maxwell, there are ozone and haze settings that can control that. You can change the sun color, but the physical sky is a very strong blue.

Well, I guess that's a whole 'nother topic about post processing... in the same vein the maxwell render could use some NR for similar results. My goal was to show the render engine output as a side-by-side comparison.

as I mentioned, the chaosgroup.com website has a downloads section for sketchup for vray materials which are all current. You need to be registered to have access.

Jean,

There are two different things discussed here. One is the snapping to geometry (which you describe in your post) and the other is inferencing (which hellnbak describes in another post about trying to draw a line slightly off-axis)
My thoughts:

1. turning on/off and filtering snapping would be great.
2. having a way (like Microstation or solidworks, etc) to draw in a plane without x-y inferencing. No inferencing at all would mean no control in the z direction... basically lost in 3D space.

@massimo said:

Well I don't know Vray or Maxwell and usually i don't use biased presets. Anyway if you like Vray output (btw I cas see some AA issues) just let it cook longer in Twilight's 09 preset and... 30 sec in PS.

Thanks Massimo. In that regards, I don't know twilight or maxwell that well, so I'm glad you took the time to run on a better setting. How does that render look before PP?

FWIW: I didn't have the vray one on the highest noise threshold settings, so yes, it's not as clean as it could be.

Edit: hmm, I just opened twilight to see what 09 setting is. FYI I used the 10 setting, and it ran 39 passes.