Yeah, I only use it for final renders because of the huge increase in time. I put the map as bump map until the final image.

@DacaD

I would take issue too with the "dumbed-down" comment. The vray engine is certainly hampered by sketchup's limitations, but it doesn't make vray itself watered down.

That's what I mean, I think the channels may be what is messing up the vrimage. When I have alpha channel selected, the resulting vrimage won't convert correctly to exr. Good to know that it works with only the rgb channel.

@tomot

The reflection is the easy part - what you are reflecting in the glass/ mirrors is the hard part.

Tomot -
There are many examples of superb photorealistic renders from vray for sketchup. A lot depends on three things - lighting, correct rendering options setup, and good materials. In your image my specific comments:
lighting: add some spot lights to shine on your cabinetry, the main problem looks to be too low lighting
options: I'll pm you a visopt
materials - add some materials with reflectivity, bump maps, good seamless textures, etc to give your rendering a more realisitc feel.

Andy

hmmm. Did you have any channels selected besides RGB color?

so far, restarting sketchup (all open instances) has worked for me. It could also be a memory issue, but see if restarting works.

I recall Fernando answered a question at the chaosgroup forum about the mirror reflection issue. I think there's a checkbox in the reflection properties for the mirror. I'll see if I can find the info.
Increasing your Hsph. subdivs would be your best bet on the blotchiness. That and increase your lighting levels. (It's worse when lighting levels are low.)

The renderings are only to pixel dimensions. If you know how wide your image is, you can calculate how many pixels per paper unit you need, depending on your print size. Otherwise, I would print out a wireframe PDF from sketchup to scale and just match the size of your rendering to the view on the page.

I would say reduce their intensity relative to your other lighting. You can increase subdivs, but I find it's better to hide the problem...
What are your irmap settings?

Wow! really superb stone material, love it!

emmissive materials?

two thoughts -
did you subdivide your geometry - the smaller the triangles of the faces, the better displacement is handled.
try a different viewpoint - displacement is resolution dependant, and your view can affect your render times.

@valerostudio: I had a thread about this on the Chaosgroup forum. There is a trick that's worked most of the time - has to do with autosave. As long as you have a file name selected in the IRmap autosave slot, the saved maps seem to work.

bug and solution for indirect illumination autosave bug
(registration required)

How do you have your GI lighting set up? One tip would be to change the GI material from sun/sky to "none" and increase the multiplier some more. Make sure "default lights" in your general options is checked. Fernando Rentas has some good tutorials on this.

You can use a plugin such as this to make your line into a face (just do a very small offset, 0.5mm for example so it still reads as a line from far away)
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=1523
or this one: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=12354

This way you can create planes since lines are typically hidden in render engines (they have no faces to reflect light)

Awesome! Glad you all are finding my tutorial useful. Many thanks to Nomer for his invaluable blogsite highlighting the work of many cg artists.
Material ID channel is one of the main reasons I keep harping on having a usable vrimage converter. Can't save id channel with exr's

Andy

save as png format and make sure you have your alpha channel selected (in the VFB options) Then you will have a transparent background in your image.

it is a bug.
If you copy geometry in SU without vray running, it seems to work. You can use thomthom's vray toys to turn off vray from loading.

@valerostudio said:

This is the latest converter that was sent to me from Chaos, not sure if its going to work with the latest version. I have not tested it out yet. Let me know how it works.

lol - dated december 2006. Definitely not current.