That's brilliant, thankyou all kindly for your help!

I'm trying to use the Vray (vray 1.49.01) dirt shader in conjunction with a regular texturemapped surface and am running into difficulties.

First, I create a basic texture mapped surface using a material with a single diffuse component. I set the diffuse colour to type texBitmap and apply my bitmap texture. I use a bumpmap in the material bump channel.

When I render, I now get a lovely brick wall

Now I am confused as to where/how I apply the dirt layer. If I create a new diffuse layer in the material, it obscures my texture map. I kinda need to "overlay" the dirt over the texture mapped surface. In all the example videos I've seen on youtube so far, the dirt shader is always demonstrated on a flat colour surface (EG Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYIxij9T7ac ) and I have yet to see an example of the dirt shader being applied over the top of a bitmap texture.

Can anyone offer any pointers on what I'm missing here? I briefly investigated the "blend" shader, but it only allows a % blend rather than a blend-mode option. If blend-mode were present it'd be a simple case of selecting "Darken" and using a dark dirt colour, but I don't see a way to do this.

In summary:

I wish to apply the VRay dirt shader to a bitmap textured wall.

Many thanks!

I right clicked and used "save as" just as you suggested and it worked perfectly. Interesting nuance that, but I suppose it's saving out only the component and not the "World wrapper" and any other strays floating around.

Many thanks for your help!!

Hi all!
Newbie lurker here, with a bit of a poser regarding dynamic components.

I've created 3 parts of a pole rig and made them into components named "base", "stem" and "top".

I then selected all 3 components and created a "parent" component called "Pole".

Editing the properties, for the base and top I locked the dimensions by putting "=40" into each X, Y and Z (Assume for now that it's a cube at the top and bottom)

Then for the Stem LenZ I used : "=Top!Z-Base!LenZ-Base!Z"

Finally for Stem Z I used: "=Base!LenZ+Base!Z"

This all works perfectly, and I can extend the construct without the top and bottom getting distorted. The stem correctly grows to fill the void as you extend the length.

The problem comes when I save the model out, and load up a house model I've been working on. When I "Import" the component it seems that the locked dimensions are lost so when I scale the component it deforms instead of the head and base maintaining their scales.

Can anyone out there offer any insight as to what I've missed ? I tried to start out as simply as possible, I have attached the pole scene file for reference.

Many thanks in advance!!
(Windows 7 64, SU 8.0 Pro Trial)

xpole.skp