The textures on other layers rely on the mapping from the diffuse layer. If you don't have a texture in diffuse, you will not have control over the mapping in SU. The best way to have a texture in diffuse that won't show up in your render is this way:

1. In your diffuse layer, next to transparency, select the little "m" button and choose the "TexAColor" and change that color to white (100% transparent.)
2. Add another diffuse layer to your material and make that the color that you want to render.

This way, you can position the material in SU, and the maps in the other layers will correspond.

(I would have linked you to the post on the vray for sketchup forum, but it's not available, and I couldn't find a description of this method in this forum. Anyone else know where there's a thorough discussion of this on sketchucation?)

-Andy

I've been waiting patiently, but it's been more than a week now. Anyone have any idea when the chaosgroup forum will be online for vfsu and vfr users?
Btw, I do have to say it's been really great to browse through the postings on the vray for max part of the forum. I have actually learned a few more tricks/ tweaks for my vray settings.

-Andy

Animation has been the one major area that I have been less than satisfied with SU and Vray. For still images, I see no equal, but animation I find a few drawbacks.

• yes, there is distributed rendering, but it does not get anywhere near the render-farm level that many other upper-tier rendering software can access. Once you have a more complex scene in terms of lighting or geometry or materials, the render time per frame can increase dramatically, and a few render slaves just won't get you there.
• animation controls in SU are just plain lousy. So far I've had most success with the paid version of the flightpath plugin, which allows you to set a target path. You also have to manipulate render times to get things working correctly.

Is this something you can just run as a simple SU animation without having to render? I imagine at the concept level it may be enough to show it at a massing level.

Andy

having an image in the environment map can help produce sky reflections. I find you have to increase the gamma value quite a bit (like to 3.0) to get the image to not look to dark in the reflection. If you have the alpha channel selected in your "VFB Channels" you will get a transparent background if you save as a PNG. This will allow you to put in a photoshop background.

@AcesHigh

indeed, the exclude materials checkbox works pretty well. First image

Here is the option of visible only in secondary for the tree material

The mirror material has the exclude materials from relfection/ refrac. option checked (optimize exclusion didn't seem to make any difference)

@unknownuser said:

i draw personal inspiration from MIR (http://mir.no/) when it comes to enterage, i think they have it spot on, u can even see eddie murphy in a couple of renders.

Sean - thanks for this link! very inspirational!

Oh, I meant when someone starts a new topic - maybe there'e a message that shows up in the post message screen that says to make sure you're posting your version number. I don't know much about forum coding, but it seems like there ought to be a way to do something like that. There are all the smilies and stuff to the right, maybe there can be a note in that space too?

nice! Maybe blinking and ants marching, and changes color every 30 seconds!!
Seriously - maybe there's a way to have a note come up whenever a new topic is posted in this subforum.

make sure when you add materials that they also show up in the sketchup material editor. If they don't show up in sketchup, they won't be mapped correctly in your model. One way to make sure is to add you material map in the sketchup material editor "use texture image"

hope this helps!

in the current version (1.49.01) there is an option in the diffuse material layer that you can check to enable alpha transparency for a png type file --> "use color texture as transparency"

righto - you have two maps, one in the diffuse layer (that controls the location and size) and one in the emmissive layer (that makes the light) Glad you got it to work!

The thing to understand is that any texture you add in the vray diffuse material is going to come in at a default scale (it seems to be 10"x10"). You have to go to the SU material editor to change the scale.

The biggest issue right now (for me at least) is that vray material properties get lost when copying geometry from one SU file to another or loading components. Hopefully they'll have a fix out soon for that.
Another minor issue is that vray raw image format is messed up, though you can save raw as exr format and that works.

hi giulia,

DOF can be tricky. In exterior scenes where you are far away, DOF is deep by its nature. It will only show up if there are objects very close to you (for example 1 meter or less) Also, you can turn down the GI and background multiplier so you can have a small f-number. You can override the focal length to use a larger length (achieve shallower DOF)

Yes, here are some improvements that I would not trade back to 1.05 for:

• texture processing is much faster - no longer have to remove textures from components
• smoothing of geometry is processed (in 1.05, everything is faceted.)
• greatly enhanced vray material editing

Some things were broken in the earlier 1.48 releases, like DOF and displacement, but most things are working now.

I don't know if the original poster's question was resolved. My suggestions is to make sure your jpeg image is in RGB format, some other formats don't work.

@Mirko - you adjust the size and orientation of the maps in Sketchup. Use the SU material editor to scale the texture.

I would suggest using a material on the model that is not pure white (you can also select a color for global material override) Pure white (255,255,255) messes with the lighting and can produce odd effects.

glad you found what you needed

That is indeed the case with channels - vray gives you separate files. You then have to combine them yourself in PS. The only exception to that is using vrimage, which combines all the channels in one file. From there you have to use the converter to get an exr file.

Which version of vray are you using? AFAIK The exr format only saves transparency in addition to the color output. The only way to save additional channels to exr is by using vrimage format and converting using the vrimg2exr converter. Apparently, vrimage doesn't work in the current build of vfsu (1.49.01 does not produce a vrimage that can be converted to exr.) Using the converter is somewhat more complicated that I have time right now to explain. If you don't know how, there are resources out there on how to do the conversion.

*edit - I'm assuming you are trying to save as a vray raw file. Otherwise, channels save the same as any other format (separate file is written) if you are saving the image after the render is complete.

orthographic view only works when physical camera is turned off. Physical camera only supports perspective view. Search the asgvis forum for more information on how to set up elevation or plan views.

There is a way to path animate in SU with Fredo6 polyline divider tool and flightpath rubies. The tutorial for it is here at the bz-animation plugin: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=20173&p=167997&hilit=flightpath#p167997
A caution - if you have a long path, you will get a huge number of scenes. I usually split my model up into different sections of the path once I am ready to render, this way the amount of scenes is under control. (and also I can take advantage of multiple processor cores...)

-Andy

Oh yeah, and crazy model! It'll look pretty cool with textures and maybe some Mayans to boot...