Good to know. I use the SU7 import typically, hadn't tried the dxf importer. I guess I will stick to that for now too.

did you try changing the color in the SU material editor? Sometimes it keeps going back to the SU material color even when you change it in the vray material editor.

hehe, well, there's vray and then there's vray... Some images you may see online are using vray for max where you can have super high-poly components, better GI and HDRI options, and a number of other tricks that the pros use. I would suggest looking at some of the tutorial videos that are available for vray for sketchup and you may find some tricks to help you in your renderings.

As mentioned above, The Tiegha file viewer is a good solution - it's just a viewer that allows you to save DWG files in different formats. Don't need to learn anything to use it.

make sure you are changing the color on the correct diffuse layer. If you have a material with more than one diffuse layer, it may be that the second one is controlling the color.

also, you might need to change your camera settings - decrease your shutter speed and your aperature settings.

I haven't looked at your file, but looking at your image, perhaps your lights are hidden behind your ceiling. Try moving them down so the wide end is below the ceiling plane.

@john2 said:

How can I get exact lighting in my rendered view of a 40 watt cylindrical fluroscent tubelight?

Unfortunately, you can't, really. The problems as vray is currently configured:

• emmissive materials don't work well as light sources. (see other threads about what happens when you use emm materil for light source for examples)
• rectangular light gets the closest, but you still have an issue where the light from the edge is darker than light from top or bottom
• ies lights are only point sources, can't be linear sources.

I wish I could help, but there really is no good way to make this work, believe me I've tried. I'm waiting (not holding my breath...) that vray will come up with a way to use ies files as a linear source. The best way currently is to use a narrow rectangular light similar in shape but a little wider than your bulb, and select for it to shine both directions, not just down. You can have a low power emmissive material (like 2.0 strength) for your bulb to get the right "look" in your render.

There is a check box in the material diffuse layer to "use color texture as transparency" for just such files.

Thanks Jason. I suppose I'll just have to see for myself when I have a chance to play with it and compare some scenes. This has been a helpful thread to get a general idea of where the strengths are of Maxwell.

Jason,

I'm curious, I don't know if you've posted about this elsewhere, what do you see as the major disadvantage of biased renders? Kinda leading I know, but you keep putting down biased renders, so I'd be interested to hear why. If you've already written extensively about it, can you point me there.

Andy

I think your signature says it all. Wil E Coyote wants free-range bird...

I would suggest using fredo's bezier spline - use the "convert to polyline divider" tool. I use a dimension of about 1/4 to 1/5 of the average distance between contour lines for the length. This simplifies the curve, but still gives you enough points so that on the long straight areas you still get enough triangles. This also helps avoid having many triangles go to one point where the contours narrow (like a ridge) Hope that helps.

Andy

interesting, those are glazed then. I am more familiar with the unglazed type. You might want to add a second reflection layer to give a deeper reflection. If you look at some of the car paint vismats (available in the download section at the chaosgroup site) those use a combination of reflection layers to give depth to the reflection. I couldn't tell you offhand which ones to look at.

The increased subdivisions gives a cleaner rendering. With low subdivisions, the result is sometimes noisy.

not if you shellac them

Serious though, that's a good point. I would suggest decreasing your reflective glossiness (and the Hilight option too) to something like 0.65 (and increase the reflective subdivisions to 16)

occasionally I run into an issue with maps where something that is 255 white or 0 black will do odd things - particularly in displacement maps. Try editing your bump map with curves so you don't have pure white or pure black. Perhaps that might help.

Andy

By the way RP, nice to see added features Any progress on changing objects' scale?

@nickdk said:

What is the status with VRay support? I couldn't locate the ticket at Chaosgroup.

Regards
Nick

Are you asking if vray will render the animations from Keyframe animation? The answer is no because vray loads the model and the views from the initial scene and then renders only that state. No layer or geometry changes will be generated.

Try the vray two-sided material. There's a tutorial about it too (floating around somewhere)
Simple steps: 1.make your curtain material - (it should be opaque, but if you want it sheer, you can use translucency and maybe a texture map)
2. create a vray two-sided material (from the vray materials window - and make sure it's NOT the SKP two sided), set both front and back materials to your curtain material, check the box for force one-sided, and set your color to a light gray)
3. apply your material to your curtain. (I also apply the original material to an edge to make sure my material doesn't get purged.)

did you read this post? This may answer your dilemna.
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=322&t=28593