If you save the image as png format - those windows will be transparent in the png file, you don't have to use the alpha mask.

I just bought your plugin, and it is fantastic! What sold me was a rendered video posted here, but now I can't find the post, of a building flying together. I think having the scale function would be really great. I am so excited that this plugin works with Twilight, I am able to do in sketchup what would take me a lot longer to setup up in other more costly software.

That was my experience, I was checking parsing time, and it ended up being about identical with layer off versus geometry deleted. There may be issues if there are extra materials that are in that off layer, it may be that processing materials could slow things down too.
Found the thread. Man, I wish they would fix the old links!
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?62797-Lights-and-Render-Time
Maybe I'll bump this for Fernando, I am very curious to get an answer from someone who knows...

off layers do work. vray only processes layers that are on. I've verified this, don't have the link, but it was on the asgvis forum.

Andy

Do you have any emmissive materials? Your irmap settings look to be taking too few samples.

with vray, I believe it has to do with it not being able to render 2pt perspective. The photomatch distorts the view, so if you type in the field of view (select the zoom icon and re-type the number in the bottom right input window) and the view pops out of 2pt, then you can render that view in vray and it will match. This is a similar bug to not being able to render parallel projection. Vray camera can only generate physically accurate camera views. Have you tried the lens shift option?

If you get a good bump map - you can use that either in the bump or displacement slot. You could also try playing with the noise and stucco texture in the vray materials textures. As far as color, you can create an additional diffuse layer to adjust color only, and use the Alpha color trick to make your first diffuse layer transparent (and use the bump map as your texture to control the mapping.) Hope that all makes sense

Andy

Hey Devin!
Glad you took the time to post, I'm also glad to see the "I hate this forum" thread on CG meet its demise. Keep up the good work and enjoy those frappucinos!

Andy

perhaps you are running into memory issues? Which version of vray and which version of sketchup are you running?

Open your materials window in sketchup and edit the texture size in the "edit" tab or that material. Vray uses the scale that is set in sketchup.

Also, make sure you have a material in your diffuse layer as explained here, as some vismat textures don't include a material in the diffuse layer:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?62274-Texture-placement-workaround-for-SketchUp (login required)

@unknownuser said:

If you're having a problem placing the texture for dispalacement or bump properly, it's probably because you don't have a diffuse texture set. SketchUp's UV system expects a texture to be set that is visible in the viewport. If no texture is visible in the viewport, the model will have no UV information.

Hope that helps.
-Andy

@valerostudio said:

My understanding is that they are focusing on getting VR for Rhino up to speed and whatever bugs they fix for that release will be in a new release for the SketchUp plug-in. Not sure how long this is going to take. Since the merger, things are fairly quiet over there.

haha it might be quiet, but I see smoke coming out of Devin's ears as he's working on all those bug fixes
I have high expectations for the next vfsu beta!

That's pretty much it. If you only have a few materials with displacement, you can turn of the disp. map for those materials and run a render at 1/2 the final resolution (height and width), then saving the LC and IR maps. Then change your settings to render LC and IR map from file, change resolution back to full res, and turn back on the disp. maps. The rendering should then start right into the final render pass. One warning though, there's a bug in the current version where the saved maps don't load correctly. I don't recall the workaround now, but it was discussed in the asgvis (now chaosgroup) forum. I'll post some info if I can dig it up. I think it had to do whether autosave image was turned on or not. (It needs to be turned on and a file path selected.)

Andy

There was a new features brochure at one point. Is that still available somewhere?

I think you need to register for their support on the main chaosgroup webpage. I had to submit a support ticket to get my registration stuff fixed. Once you are in their system, they may be able to get your forum account up and running. At least that's the way it worked for me.

Andy

Thanks Devin for taking the time to respond. I've got a support ticket in process and hopefully they can get me squared away at some point.

So Devin - I'm somewhat confused. I saw you posted (at CG forums) that you don't have access to the vismats, so I went back to the chaosgroup support logon. They had a new page up where they asked for product purchase information, as well as forum username. There was an explanation about only registered owners having access to the forum. All well and good by me, but does that mean I'll have a new forum account without all my old posts? Or is that what is going on by hand, coordinating all the re-registrations with updating all the old forum accounts?
Also, I got the "You do not have enough permissions to this page!" warning as well when going to the downloads section.
I wish there was some better dissemination of information about all this.
Thanks for any insight you may have.

Andy

Yeah, I wrote to support Friday, still nothing. Not able to post or anything.

The only way currently to do true parallel projection is to turn off physical camera. Sorry

since I still can't post there, I thought I'd ask in case Devin or anyone else reading this knew. Is there an expected completion date for getting all the old accounts activated? If my account by some time is not activated, is there a particular person to contact to get my account active? I'm hesitant to contact support yet, as it seems they are doing all they can to try and get things merged, but obviously have run into some major stumbling blocks.
I hope the spirit of the old forum comes back as soon as all the regular participants are able to post to their hearts desire! That and I am dying to see a new beta!!

Andy

Hey, this is a great thread! It's helpful to see how other people have their workflow. I agree about not having the buttons too deep, I've pared down my visible ones as much as possible. Gaieus, good suggestion about the customizing plugin, there are some long toolbars where I only use one or two features so they end up in the menu only.

-Andy