two things you can do:

• under your irradiance map settings, change your Hsph. Subdivisions to something line 150
• increase your overall lighting level, add some rectangular lights off camera if possible. There's not enough lighting in those areas.

Wow
That's amazing! I love the specular reflection on the floor - that's just so realistic! The filtered light quality is simply beautiful. Did you say what rendering software you used?

Good backups are definitely critical! A few suggestions I have:

1. burn DVD's of current files monthly - always good to have optical backup.
2. My file sync software of choice is Synkron.
3. I got rid of mirroring my hard drives after I experienced some corruption problems. It's quite a *itch to get files off of one half of a mirrored drive... Now I have a setup where I schedule synkron to copy updated files daily to a second hard drive that I basically use as a mirror, without the mirror format. I then have an external drive I update weekly.

I have a question Jorge - why do you want a new release? Is there something that doesn't work for you? Sketchucation gives me something new every week to enjoy with the constant release of new or updated plugins.

That's a good idea - having some sort of tiered approach with support for those who subscribe($) while still keeping the bulk of free users.
I like.

Hey, I'm not familiar with lynda.com. I'm just wondering what's the difference from the existing tutorials that are available from ChaosGroup (was asgvis) There are some pretty good ones already that explain the workflow.

and if I need to give credence to my point: Just saw this...
http://forum.sketchup4architect.com/forum.php

how did you load them into the other scene? There is currently a bug in copying and pasting that does what you describe (lose layers in the material) If you save vismat and then load, it usually works. But having vray open in multiple windows is also sometimes buggy...

Dave - I did mean that tongue in cheek. I'm more thinking about places like NY Times, etc that lost a lot of looks because they tried to make people pay for something that has a lot of free alternatives. How quickly would an alternate SU forum spring up if this were to become a subscription site?

edit: (now that I think about it, the vray for sketchup forum comes to mind... kinda lonely there.)

@dave r said:

Of course based on the OP's suggestion, Google could buy SCF and Sketchucation could become a subscription only service.

what a perfect way to drive away users...

That's been my experience too. If you have heavy geometry, it takes a very long time to load into vray. That's just the nature of the 32bit environment that sketchup is limited to.

check your version of vray for SU. Maybe you are using an older version?

@valerostudio said:

NOTE: if you are like me and purge your file often, beware that purging will delete you front and back shade materials and then the SHADE material will no longer work.

A trick I use for that is to color a line along the edge with the material that is in the 2 sided material, that way it is still in the model so doesn't get deleted in a purge.

Thanks for posting your work-in-progress. I can see right away that you don't have any direct light on your walls. Do you have the sun turned off? If you rely only on GI, you will not get the strong contrast needed for making your materials stand out. My suggestion is either put some more lighting sources in your scene or put some direct sunlight on your wall.
By the way, the current version of vray is 1.49.01 so make sure you update when you have a chance.

You're right - my mistake, the filter option only affects "coloring" of the reflection. The two glossy reflection slots are where you can put the specular map. I would suggest using bump map first, and not doing displacement if it looks okay with the bump. Displacement takes a lot more care to set up correctly and can lead to very long render times. Seems like you are finding the right tutorials, hope you get it sorted out.
One thing to note is that your reflection depends a great deal on what is being reflected. I would suggest using an HDRI for your background to get a good effect.

some more info if you can:

• which version of vray for SU?
• what are your rendering options settings (looks like they are rather low quality)
• do you have a light source (omni light) inside the lamp? (you''ll need a light source under the lampshade

The two sided material is created from the vray materials dialogue. You select make new material and pick the "2 sided material" option. Then you can select the base materials for the front and back when you edit the new material you made. The grayscale color sets the amount of translucency. Then apply the material to the shade.

Andy

wacky! So how is it determined which plugin loads first???

Nice work, thanks Allan!

did you use the Vray for SU installer? Perhaps try installing again. Make sure you select the right version of sketchup (if you have more than one version installed)

you need to have a reflection layer in your material - use the vray material editor to add it. Then you can add that map as a bitmap in the "Filter" slot. If you want to specify the amount of highlight reflection - you can add that texture in the "Hlight" category separately. I believe the "Filter" slot controls both.