Um, good point again - look at these times as relative - I am running a 6 core AMD processor at about 3.2 Ghz 
Edit: I mentioned it in the post, I used Medium+ setting. I tried the high+ but it looked exactly the same, and 3 minutes for the longer scene.
Here are two interior scenes rendered from the attached model.
I am using the Maxwell free rendering plugin from the downloads (not any latest build. May look into that later on.) Vray is the current 1.49.01 with a combination skylight and GI and slightly higher irradiance map settings. Since the topic is maxwell vs. twilight, I also rendered the scenes at interior+ settings, letting it run for 30 mins. The maxwell scenes ran for about 30 minutes each.
Edit: added biased renders from Twilight on Medium+ setting, first scene 50 seconds, second scene 110 seconds. Thanks for the suggestion Massimo
comparison scene 1
comparison scene 2
and the file is here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?yiujl1c94y1wlf9
I hear your point, and I added the biased setting as well. PDQ! I just think the output for interiors is relatively lousy.
I think the usefulness of this comparison is that there are choices based not just on quality and speed but in price and ease of use that distinguishes these render engines. The maxwell GUI and the way the settings are done just feels much more modern and intuitive, props to the developers in the effort that went into it.
Andy
I will post a test scene and some examples of renders from the scene as soon as I get a chance.
Thanks for the interest!
Andy
I believe there are two versions of the Maxwell plugin - one is the paid version with resolution up to HD, and a completely free version that is resolution up to 800px and some other reduced capacities.
Well, actually, there is a good point there - there is a difference between inferencing and snapping. I was thinking it would be nice to disable snapping. The issue with inferencing is that there would need to be a way to lock movement to a plane or, yes, you will be lost in 3D space...
nice! now there's a worthwhile bounty. Would love to see that happen. Give me a nice "F3" a la ACAD...
Well, I finally had a chance to try the Maxwell free plugin. I like it! The user interface is great, and I like the preset material types. The adjustments that I want to make are all there - environment settings, material reflections, etc. In a few tests, it is actually not as slow as I feared compared to vray. I did try some interior daylit scenes, and while the speed is not too far off, the output quality is significantly more noisy with Maxwell. Overall, I like the lighting quality better than twilight, but I didn't see a whole lot of difference compared to vray. Of course, with vray, it is much more complicated to control material qualities, so it would be more difficult for a newbie to use out of the box.
In any case, it was nice to try, and I can certainly recommend it to those looking. For me though, Maxwell doesn't appear to offer anything that I can't get with vray.
If the limited resolution is not a problem, there are a few out there. I just had a chance to try the free maxwell plugin, and its user interface is quite easy to use.
I would imagine you can get most things in one layer. There are many map slots available for the different aspects of reflections. I know some of the metal materials use two layers because there are two different IOR values used. Is there a particular example you are working on?
Happy New Year!
I like this one better. I like the lines on the side how you have it swooping down. There was something sort of Volvo XC about the last one with the big fenders. My one thought is the front grille might be better integrated, somehow the lines don't quite mesh.
Andy
I ask about hosting because I recently had issues with my hosting provider. After a support ticket, I find they were migrating servers and other behind-the-scenes stuff which affected my website. It may be useful to contact support and see if there is anything at issue with the hosting server.
Yes, the loading does seem moderately slow, the images in particular.
Are you hosting this yourself?
unfortunately, that's an old set of materials. The way materials are defined has changed in the current version of vfsu, and some of those old one will not work. You can get materials from the actual official website of vray for sketchup: http://chaosgroup.com (registration required)
That is an improvement! Maybe now you can try out a displacement map to make it really nice!
If you see any video tutorial, I would recommend starting with this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnrC9-c3cgI
There are lots more from chaosgroup and asgvis, but I think this one helps explain lighting very well.
Have you tried Thomthom's vray toys? There is an aspect view setting with the plugin.
The pattern you have in sketchup will be the pattern you have in vray. If you see tiling in SU, you're going to see it in vray. On thing to be aware of is that an imported vray (vismat) texture will come in at a default size in Sketchup (in imperial units - it comes in at 10 inches by 10 inches) so you have to change the texture size in sketchup to be correct for your model (say a brick texture that needs to be 64 inches square) You might also just have a low resolution texture that does not tile well, try a different texture.
Can you post an image of your rendering?
Oh, that hurts! My sympathies. Also, another advice is to do optical backups regularly too. DVD's can't be overwritten (as long as you close it.)