I'm not sure I completely follow. You are making unique textures, and relying on the V-Ray render process to write those unique textures out to our texture cache folder. Then you're using photoshop to manipulate those textures in some sort of batch operation, correct?

From what I gather from your post, your goal is to grab all of the textures used in your current scene, and place them in a more user friendly location, is that correct? I would use the 2.0 "pack scene" feature to achieve this. The scene file, and all external file dependencies will be zipped up so that you can move the files anywhere you want. We search within 3 directory levels of wherever the scene file is, if we can not find the files on disk using the path that is specified for that texture, so as long as you keep the textures in the same directory, or within 3 sub directories of the scene file, the scene should render using the textures that were packed.

In V-Ray for SketchUp 2.0, you no longer need to (or can) have a shared folder that is used for DR. File transfer happens behind the scenes, and it's fast. The whole asset collection nonsense is behind us now.

Also in V-Ray for SketchUp 2.0, the cache folder should get cleared out. I can't recall off hand if it's every time you open/create a model, or if it's something that happens according to timestamp of the texture, but either way, it should be getting cleared out on occasion. If that doesn't happen, please report this bug.

yes sir

good catch

1.6 never went public, it was a beta version only. The upgrade path is from 1.49.01 to 2.0

it's bundled with the installer should be in the start menu

@khodan said:

@dkendig said:

looks like you're using DR, and something isn't transferring to the DR node properly. This should be resolved in our 2.0 release afaik. Have you tried a demo?

What do you mean with a demo?

we have a demo or trial version of our 2.0 version available on our website. I was making the assumption that you were not using VfS 2.0. Glad to hear you resolved the issue though

nah, we just did planning for it last week, we are much too far away from that to say any rough dates. First there will be a service release, then we will be working on 3.0 I believe.

materials = Sketchup.active_model.materials
mat = materials.add "My New Material"

#component instances
Sketchup.active_model.selection.grep(Sketchup::ComponentInstance){|inst| inst.material = mat}
#groups
Sketchup.active_model.selection.grep(Sketchup::Group){|grp| grp.material = mat}
#faces
Sketchup.active_model.selection.grep(Sketchup::Face){|f| f.material = mat;f.back_material = mat}

looks like you're using DR, and something isn't transferring to the DR node properly. This should be resolved in our 2.0 release afaik. Have you tried a demo?

or wait for our 3.0 release where we will have it implemented

you can send me an email if you'd like, devin.kendig@usa.chaosgroup.com

yes, generally this tends to do the trick, but we found that it was a tad faster to have your own lookup table that keeps track of definition relevance. The only downside, is that you are at the mercy of the observer system in that case, but the observers these days seem fairly stable, so that isn't currently an issue.

can you share the file?

It's on our todo list, but it's not in the 2.0 version. There is a bit of work we need to do behind the scenes to get section cuts to work properly.

reading/writing sketchup geometry data can be rather slow, but we did find some optimizations for the patch that andybot mentioned If you're interested in testing a nightly build to see if it behaves better for you, we would like to hear some feedback. Just send me a PM.

There is a 2.0 demo available, so you can verify that the new version will work for you. We put those watermarks there for a reason, you can use it all you want, and we get free advertising

Once you learn the ropes and can get some professional quality renders going, then you might want to consider paying the fee to upgrade, because you'll easily be able to make that money back after your first visualization job.

if you have tons of ram, you can use your local machine by using the ip address of 127.0.0.1 rather than localhost. The 64bit workflow is definitely the way to go. One day SketchUp will go 64bit, and when it does, V-Ray will really be able to run free.

yes, exporting will just export a set of options that are different than the defaults. This can be used to create presets, which are accessed via the dropdown menus at the top of the options editor. Presets are supposed to only modify settings relevant to that specific preset. So if you wanted a preset that simply sets the output resolution to a certain size, you could make that one change, export your settings to the presets folder, and then easily access that preset for later use.

The main issue here, in my experience is memory consumption. SketchUp is limited to 4gb of ram, it doesn't matter what hardware you have, what operating system you have, etc. That's why Maxwell has an issue, and it's why V-Ray has an issue. If you are hitting that memory limit, you're going to crash. Sketchup on OSX appears to consume more memory than it does on Windows, as does the V-Ray plugin. Also, if you have multiple Sketchup models open on OSX at the same time, each model contributes to that 4gb memory limit. On windows, this is not the case. Each Sketchup window has it's own 4gb playground to work with.

Many other modeling applications have made the jump to become a 64bit application, which allows an application to use far more memory. Currently it's not even possible to have a computer that exceeds the maximum amount of memory that a 64bit application can use (it's something like 18 exobytes).

When you load SketchUp, it loads any extensions that are currently installed and active. If you have many plugins, you're going to use more memory. Just loading V-Ray's dependencies can take some time, and eat up quite a bit of memory. V-Ray does indeed scan over the model and look for textures, materials, lights, proxies, etc. During that process, it consumes more memory as it builds various data structures that help us interact with the SketchUp model, and even render it in real time.

It's possible to have a model that will crash due to memory consumption on OSX, by simply opening the model, and due to OSX's feature which will allow an application to reopen whatever documents were last open in the application, it's possible to end up in the crashing loop as described above. The workaround of moving a file is very effective in breaking the endless loop of crashes. This prevents V-Ray from scanning the file, and prevents SketchUp from loading the file in to memory in the first place.

If you have any example scenes that demonstrate this issue, and are willing to share them for diagnostic purposes, please contact me, because I would like to resolve as many of these issues as possible before we release our next patch. You can reach me at devin.kendig@usa.chaosgroup.com. We now have a dedicated VfS for OSX developer, as well as a developer solely devoted to VfS for Windows. We are hoping we can resolve this issue, but it may require some work on the part of Trimble, to allow plugins such as V-Ray and Maxwell to utilize more memory than we are currently limited to.

definition.instances.empty? won't give you an accurate indicator of the usefulness of a definition unfortunately. It can cut out some obvious ones to skip, but not all of the useless ones. If an instance is used in a definition, and that parent definition isn't instanced anywhere, the first definition will still say it has one instance. It's not wrong... but it's not helpful either. It would be nice to know if a definition is actually used in your model somewhere. Of course if you purge unused first, you should be fine. This can be especially frustrating when working with a model in which you are not allowed to purge unused definitions.

Example:

1. Make a cube
2. Make the cube a component
3. Make a copy of the component instance
4. Make a new component out of the two instances
5. Delete the resulting component instance
6. Type this in the ruby console: Sketchup.active_model.definitions.each{|df| puts "definition #{df.name} instance count: #{df.instances.size}"};nil