@jason_maranto said:

Also as an aside (to no one in particular), the overreacting on hearsay or conjecture is pretty amusing the first dozen times it happens but after a while it gets pretty tiresome -- before jerking the knee in overreaction perhaps some slight investigation about the facts is best.

Best,
Jason.

lol, isn't that what forums are for... to hear the same questions and incorrect information repeated over and over. I think people are a little more savvy than to believe everything they read right away (at least I like to think so.)
I think you've done a great job explaining your product. I've been following your posts and announcements with interest and when I have time I intend to give maxwell a try.

Andy

I've recently started using twilight, whereas my main render engine is vray. (Because of the limitation of vray to export animations - particularly if objects are animated.) My main gripe thus far is IMO severely limited material settings. I intend at one point to explore making my own, but haven't had a chance to look into that. I also don't like the render quality as much, but that's just my opinion again. Besides these negatives, I find it quite satisfactory for my purposes. Easy to use, good output, and good range of fast or quick render settings.

@ali64risk said:

hi
i have a question about Displacement...
please see the attached file by the link below:
http://www.2shared.com/file/PlBGMQqP/Desktop.html
it contains vismat material and visopt options which I used in my rendering.
when I render first skp, the result is the first jpg...
but when I add a simple plane without Displacement (second skp), the Displacement of first plane is gone (as you can see in second jpg)!
please tell me what is wrong here?

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

Light Cache - it's a secondary illumination pass - it sort of slowly fills in dots until you see a rough image of your scene.

Well, yes, you do have to start the render. Nice thing is, if you know the area you want to render, you can stop once you see enough of the LC pass and then just do that area. For test renders though, that's why I suggest turning off any of your high-poly layers, or disable displacement in your materials (two of the things that really slow down a render. That and having too many lights...)

@john2 said:

Is there any way to like i get an isolated render of that material in a small window or select just that material to get rendered and get processed before vray shows a render screen? I often end up wasting time to just take a look at material previews in render.

hmm, sounds like you may have a few options

1. how about the material preview option in your material editor? Limit to this is that it's small and only a sphere.
2. you can render just a window (little teapot and red rectangle button) in your VFB (vray frame buffer - the window that shows your current rendering) . That's what I do all the time as I tweak materials & lighting.
   2b. If it takes a long time to load your model to start rendering - you can put high poly things like 3D plants, etc. on a layer and turn off that layer just for the test render. Helps get much shorter render times.

Andy

Definitely an issue with copying and pasting if that's what you are trying to do. pretty consistently, vray will forget any material layers and mapping from one file to the other. My workaround for this is to do the copying and pasting with the vray plugin disabled. (actually, I just do my copy and paste on another machine instead of the one I have vray on.)

Rocky,

I'd like to give a word of thanks for your doing this thread. I appreciate having an experienced modeler share is experience with a new software. When I have time to spare I like to look at new software as well, and hate running into these kind of dead-ends (poor inferencing seems to be the biggest culprit here)

Andy

I would argue that for still images, you don't need billions of polygons as long as you have good post-processing workflow. It's just textures after all. Look at DavidH's post-processing threads for starters.

Actually, I wonder if the subscription would be worth more to the novices who are working their way up (and need extra support) than the pros who already know what they're doing. Just a thought...

Did you see this thread?
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=333&t=41611

Yeah, the reflection layer will do that (reflect the environment)

make sure the alpha channel is selected in your vfb channels options.

There's a lot you can do with textures in photoshop. I'm thinking the first image, the foreground grass and tree could very easily be photoshopped in, and the building is easy to render in SU and vray. Depending on how good you are at post-processing, you can get pretty close to the last one. Forget about trying to put convincing 3D landscape in SU...
Second image, you can use emmissive materials to get that effect, as long as you have other light sources (emmissive by itself doesn't work well at all)
Brodie's comment is on-point - you need to find the right texture sources to get convincing texture quality.
Good luck.
Andy

how about extrude line and then joint push-pull on the resulting surface?

After checking on the reversed faces, did you check that your geometry for the water is in a group or component. Check the first sticky comment for specifics: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=322&t=28593

If you don't have a good monitor now, get one. Best purchase I've made in a while - a nice 24" IPS panel with a calibrator.

Pretty cool! One additional step would be to mask out the city lights on the bottom of the image.

Keep up the good work!

Wow Jim. All I can say is wow. That is some really wonderful modeling.

Hey Kalu, Glad to help! We all learn something.
Stefan, I hadn't even seen the rectangular lights at the windows. No wonder the render times were so high, that's a lot of competing lights. I used the global "lights" option to turn off all the light sources. My thought is that if you can't see the difference of the light in the scene with the GI on, you probably shouldn't have it in the scene.

Andy