Thanks for the replies.
Most of the answers assume healing individual occurrences - I was hoping for some kind of global solution. Sometimes my SketchUp models will change dozens of times before they get to a final state and the result can be dozens and dozens of these broken lines. Finding them all and treating them individually would be tedious.

Fortunately I've figured out how to use the List panel in modo to find these vertexes that are associated with only two lines and delete them as a group.

But it would be nice to do it in SketchUp before the move over to modo.

Reading the notice on the chaos group home page makes it all seem kind of shadowy and negative. I hope the status of current users, regardless of where their original purchase was from, will be honored for future upgrades and whatever. I bought my license from Vray.com (odd that someone else has that site name), not Asgvis.

We'll see.

@unknownuser said:

And then there's these ($49 each, but pretty informative):

http://software.asgvis.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=661

Are these worth the $$$$? I'm used to the modo world where most tutorials are in the $25 category and even the expensive ones, like Dan Ablan's, have been reduced to $45 for 12 hours of video. So this seems a bit steep. But I would like a good thorough Vray tutorial. I'm getting along with Vray but there's an awful lot of basic stuff I still don't know.

I do wish the workflow between SketchUp and modo was a bit more fluid. Deformations like this are a one button task in modo.

Damn! These promos tend to appear just when I've dumped the little $$$ I have into some other software. I have a new job that is requiring a lot more knowledge of Illustrator and InDesign than I have so I bumped my Photoshop license up to a Design Standard license. No more software for me for months.

This is one of my biggest gripes about LO.

I design stairs and dimensions are rarely on axis so LO becomes a convenient way to pump out PDFs, not much more. I'd like to find a way to overcome this problem. I can see the potential of LO but my use of it is limited because of this problem.

I'd really like a plugin like this. I find myself struggling a lot with the organization of materials and layers. In modo, my other primary application, it's quite straightforward and very simple.

@baherzi said:

@arail1 said:

Thanks Frederik.

I bought the license through http://www.vray.com. Money is tight and the $100 difference was too much to pass up. I assume it's the same product with the same level of support as ASGVis would offer.

Very excited about having a V-Ray license. I've had a couple of demos but now, with a permanent license, I feel like my SketchUp is a complete package.

Arail1 I also purchased from http://www.vray.com did you have any problems with communication? I recieved a reciept confirmation but that was it no email with serial number and link to download. I kinda worried that they might be bogus I've called and emailed and nothing from them at all. today I'm starting to call every hour to see if I can get anything other than their voicemail saying they are on the phone.

how long did it take for you to get your email with serial number?

I'm sorry to hear that. I purchased the license late one night and got a automated reply saying that orders were processed during normal business hours. The email with my serial number arrived early the next morning.

Good luck.

I finally got back to this work and started with the Catmull Clark advice. That made a tremendous difference - it made everything very crisp and clear, like taking gauze off the picture. Now I'm going to systematically try the other suggestions.

I'll report back later but I wanted to stop in and say thanks - that was a real help.

Almost as a rule you'll find that people on 3D forums consider the Quadro line to be way overpriced compared to the GeForce. I can't say for sure but I think the Quadro only pays for itself when you move into high end architectural engineering programs that require continual math calculations.

Get a GTX570 or 580

Thanks for both of your replies.

I just purchased a VRay license and deleted the demo version I was using. I did that before I read these posts so I'm not sure what settings I was using.

Later today I'll open the scene again and experiment with the settings you each suggested and see what happens.

Thanks Frederik.

I bought the license through http://www.vray.com. Money is tight and the $100 difference was too much to pass up. I assume it's the same product with the same level of support as ASGVis would offer.

Very excited about having a V-Ray license. I've had a couple of demos but now, with a permanent license, I feel like my SketchUp is a complete package.

There seem to be 3 companies - Chaos, Visual Dynamics and Asgvis. The price for V-Ray from Visual Dynamics is $100 less than it is at Asgvis. I'm curious about the price difference. The version is 1.49.01 so it seems to be the same product. I hope so.

I'm a bit confused about which company is V-Ray.
I'm about to purchase a license from VisualDynamics - the web address is http://www.vray.com.

Who is asgvis?

Am I ordering from the correct company?

TIA

I'm getting a kind of hazy light and I wonder if anyone can make suggestions about sharpening up the image, making it a bit crisper.

Thanks in advance.

Oh, Vray 1.49 (I think - I'm on a 30 demo. Not sure where you get that info)

Sorry if the answer is obvious but I've just started to use Layout and I can't figure out how to make linear dimensions.

I want dimensions parallel to the XY axis not aligned to points. The dimensions 214" / 101-1/4" / 112-3/4" were done in SketchUp. I want to be able to do that in Layout but all I get is an aligned dimension point to point as the two other dimensions show.

Thanks for any advice I can get.

@gaieus said:

Yes, I do. Sometimes however I feel that as an admin here, I should not express my preferences. But then who knows?

Admittedly, that could be an issue. I'm not sure what's appropriate. Cheerleading for a program as a user is different than cheerleading as an admin. It might give the appearance that Sketchucation is giving an official endorsement and that would be wrong.

I spoke to someone on the phone this morning who wanted advice on a rendering program and the conversation opened up a whole other avenue of thought.

On the basis of my very limited knowledge I suggested he try Twilight and dissuaded him from any of the more complex programs because he wasn't clear where he wanted to go with this. He's a designer / builder and he's not sure if he just needs a good renderer to show his work or he's going to follow a path similar to mine and leave shop work behind and try to make his living off his computer. If he was sure that his days of actually building were behind him I would suggest V-Ray or Thea. (I use modo but that's sort of a whole other thing.)

But when you're starting out it would seem that a program like Twilight is a relatively inexpensive way to get the basics down and, if you hit a wall up ahead, your cost to get there will have been pretty minimal and you'll have learned a lot of useful information that you can then take with you to V-Ray or one of the higher end programs when you need to expand your abilities. Alternately, you might get to a plateau where you find that the cheaper program does everything you need and you won't have spent six or seven hundred dollars for functionality that you'll never use.

So we could break this general topic down into different categories of questions:

What renderer produces the most extraordinary images (let the brawl begin)
What renderer is the easiest to produce the most extraordinary images (the brawl spills out into the parking lot)
What renderer should you own for those occasions when you need to get something out the door quickly (my original question)
What renderer should you start with if you're not sure how much rendering you're going to need to do in the future (my friend's question)

@gaieus said:

The very problem with these questions is that there is (probably) no person who uses all of these renderers to be able to correctly answer your question.

I wouldn't despair about the usefulness of these threads. I've read through many of them and learned a lot.

I think the problem is the initial question that starts the topic tends to be too broad - i.e. can you make dazzling photoreal renders with this or that program? And the answer generally is - Yes, if you're Solo.

But my interest was in the opposite direction - let's say you have a client who announces that in an hour she is popping off to somewhere (Paris, Biarritz, Le Cote d'Azur, wherever they go) and you want to show her progress so she'll cut you a check before she leaves. You want to send her something in literally 15 minutes and you want it to be a bit better than the native SketchUp or Layout output. Some amongst us could do that in any program but most of us can't.

So, given that scenario the question becomes quite different. I followed up on the Twilight suggestion and found that it fit the bill pretty well.

No setup, no lights, no fussing at all. Now I understand that Twilight can probably generate much more spectacular results than this but that wasn't what I wanted to find out. Given the parameters of very low cost and as close to being a one button solution as is reasonable - what rendering programs fit that description?

So I have one good option as a result of starting this topic. I intend to try out Shaderlight and LightUp but during the week I didn't have the time to try out 3 different programs.

@solo said:

Rendering…
There are literally thousands of threads regarding rendering, be it comparisons, advice, features, issues, bugs, new releases, etc.

Maybe, but really why? How many have actually rendered anything and got paid to do so?

Well said.

I have been paid for rendering work but more importantly my renderings sell my work. I'm designing two stairs right now both of which are for clients who saw things they wanted on my website. All of the images on my site are renderings of things I've not built. Generally I model and render things I want to build, not what I have built. That way the necessary compromises of my built work aren't driving my direction forward, my ambitions for what I want to build are. Hope that makes sense.

I can't imagine someone succeeding at rendering who doesn't have some kind of inner compulsion. I would say all of the manuals are incomplete or poorly written. More often than not the illustrations refer to a version of the software that doesn't even exist anymore. The available video tutorials are a godsend but rarely are they complete enough to get you into home base. It's all a massive headache.

To paraphrase Solo - you have to need it. I closed down a woodworking shop that I had in operation (limping, stumbling along) for twenty years and then found that, after the relief of not having to pay the rent and the salaries anymore, I still wanted to make things. So now I'm modeling and rendering rather than cutting and gluing. I'm not very good at it. I can go over and over the manuals and still not get a passable render without an enormous amount of trial and error. I'd like it to be easier and I'm sure it will be over time.

But the bottom line is - nothing can tell a prospective client more clearly what I want to have built for them than a good rendering.

@tomasi said:

eloquently put. I get it now....its like cable vs. Dish vs. etc.
Arbitrary. Thanks for taking the time. Yes, I enjoy the rendering end product, but the time it takes from making a change to seeing what that change does in the "real" rendering is sooooo frigin slow its painstaking. Is that just the name of the game? Can I do something to my computer to make it faster (like give it some meth or something)?

In today's market I would say these components will give you the best bang for your buck:
i7 2600K CPU
GTX570 GPU
16 GBs of RAM
650 watt power supply