I also think it's difficult to have it changing all the time when designing, but I don't use 1001 bits...

@jiminy-billy-bob said: @coreymurray said: (double sided tick box in option in mat editor) This tick box only means that the material will be applied to both sides of the polygons. A Vray2sided Mtl is a really special material. It allows you to have different materials between the front and back sides of your polygons, and blend these two materials together (and the light they receive) depending on a grey value (or map). This allows you to mimic translucency for very thin objects (one face only): Paper, leaves, curtains, etc. https://www.google.fr/webhp?#q=vray%202sided Thanks for the explanation Jiminy - that's a really powerful technique.

using 'force sync all materials' then using Cleanup³ seems to help...

Nice

@dkendig said: Look guys... I know you want this service release, but trying to hack our website isn't going to speed things along That's double-plus-ungood. Hope you're back on track soon!

@cuttingedge said: I think my trouble is more with sketchup 2013 than vray. the rendering part is smooth but I had bugsplat after bugsplat in the modeling part. which I think has nothing to do with vray. It's a gamble for you to install Vray 1.6 on SU 2013. YOu may acquire a license for SU 2013, but keep the vRAY 1.6 beta on your more stable SU like v8. In my experience, it's the opposite... I first installed Vray 1.6 on SU8, and got bugsplats over bugsplats while modeling (I guess due to Observers used by RT). So I loaded it only when needed. Then I moved on to SU2013 and have much less bugsplats.

Thomthom's Selection Toys (http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=14975) is indispensable for this. It's a one-click operation and one of my essential plugins. When you have a renderer which renders instanced components, using 3d trees becomes feasible, as long as you use some form of proxy object in SU to make performance acceptable. There are many 3d tree applications, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them have instanced leaf components when imported into SU. Sometimes you can use plugins to regularise these things. Thom also has a plugin called Component Comparison (http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=30143), which might also help with components which aren't quite identical.

I only use a fraction of them regularly. I "disable" many, too (renaming the extension or temporarily moving them into another folder) but when one is on the forums too much, often help with those plugins is needed and I keep many active.

I don't really know anything about the 3DS file structure, but I would guess that as SU itself has no other material properties than colour and texture, the exporter would set all the other required values to something considered as a default. Most users export 3DS in order to render the model in some external rendering application by adding lights and other features not available in SU. In the applications I have used, the ambient property of a material, makes it glow quite unrealistically, so I would have had to turn it off. I am not even sure that the property is set by SU. If it is optional, the problem might even be with your receiving application or its settings, if it adds a black ambient "channel" if your 3DS file has none. Just blundering guesses Anssi