in our downloads section on our site, you should see a section for the material studio. That's our stand alone material editor.

We fixed an issue related to this in our latest 2.0 service release (2.00.25244). If anyone encounters this issue in that version or later, please submit a bug report to vfswip@chaosgroup.com. If anyone encounters this issue with a version older than 2.00.25244, do not contact us about it, it's already fixed (as far as we know anyway), please upgrade.

you're looking for a feature we haven't added yet.

@chippwalters said:

There will always be pirates and ANY software can be cracked. Please, companies, have a bit more respect for your customers and use other, more serviceable means to protect your intellectual property!

Licensing just keeps honest people honest. We are fully aware of this fact. That's why we switched to dongles, it protects our IP and is easier to work with than our previous licensing method.

Defending? No, just pointing out the outcry about difficulty licensing, occurred after we took steps to resolve the issue. Licensing our product is easier, and more reliable than it ever has been. Offline licensing is a cinch now, you don't have to worry about network communication issues in a corporate environment anymore, you can reinstall our product without having to shoot us an email, licensing doesn't suddenly stop working out of the blue due to a software update, etc. Not to mention issues with international customers not being able to reach our license server due to region restrictions, or the shear lag in the communication (not everyone lives in the US). The dongle licensing system is time tested, corporate IT guy approved, and is what we use for every other flavor of V-Ray.

I'm not saying that having a little piece of hardware that you have to worry about (to some degree at least) isn't a pain at all, but I don't believe it's deserving of so much pushback. You could have hundreds of seats on the one dongle, and serve it out across an entire company, or you can have one seat and carry it in your laptop bag. The only legitimate argument I have heard against dongles, is that if you lose or damage it, you will have some downtime while waiting for a new dongle. As a laptop user myself, I can certainly understand the "struggle" of only having 2 usb ports (which hopefully both work), but aside from the initial frowny face I made when plugging that dongle into the usb hub it now resides in, I haven't even had to think about that little dongle ever since.

I understand that other software uses other means to protect their intellectual property as well, and sometimes, in some situations, their solutions work really well. The same can be said for our old software based licensing and our current dongle licensing. It all depends on your setup.

chippwalters: I would be interested in hearing what your significant issues are with dongle licensing, perhaps there are some items on your list that we could address. If you are stuck using an older version of our product, because of your concerns with dongle licensing, you are really missing out, and I would like to fix that asap.

Our software licensing was worse than dongles by a long shot. It was great when it worked... sometimes... The dongle should be pretty simple to work with. If you do a typical install (not unchecking anything), it should just work. It's kind of a pain to carry around a usb dongle, so I just plug it into a machine and point my laptop at it. The dongle can be public facing as well, so you don't even have to be on the same network as the machine that has the dongle plugged in (or you can just vpn in if you have a vpn set up). I have heard of some users having a little difficulty, but typically that's due to a faulty install of some sort (not saying this is the customer's fault, installs don't always go according to plan for a variety of reasons), or the license server not running for whatever reason.

We are aware that it's possible to steal the product, and that we shouldn't punish our customers... but the dongle licensing is SIGNIFICANTLY easier to troubleshoot/fix, it's mobile, and it doesn't require someone at our company to manually process a request to simply REINSTALL the product (on the same computer), like our software licensing did. You should have seen the difference in our support inbox once we switched licensing to dongles. It's extremely obvious that the dongle licensing is less prone to error. I think you guys either missed how awful our old licensing was, or haven't tried setting up a floating license server with the current dongle licensing.

whoops, I turned this in to a feature request thread! Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I wish they would add Environment Fog....

lejzidejzi - 1.49.02 was never released, and is a pirated version. Please upgrade to the latest version of V-Ray, in order to get access to a 64bit version of our product. The 4gb patch that you guys are talking about, just turns on LARGEADDRESSAWARE, which is on by default in SketchUp 2014 or later. SketchUp 7,8, and 2013 did not have this turned on, and in that case, this patch could hack the SketchUp executable to access up to 4gb of memory (golf clap), but the 64bit version can access more memory than any workstation can possibly have for the next 5 years. Please do not attempt to hack the very outdated 1.49.02 with this patch, it's dangerous, and it shouldn't change anything at all if you're using a version of SketchUp that was made in the past 2 years.

although that is a nice version

we just need to fix the bug, that's the solution.

Those materials are definitely not very recent. We changed the extension of our material format to .vrmat sometime in the past year or two. We changed from a binary to xml based format about 4 years ago also, which caused some compatibility issues. There were huge archives of user made materials being passed around, before our own material library grew to the size it is today, it's possible that these older materials are from before our switch to xml.

not sure where you're downloading them from, but try some of the vrmats that are on the chaosgroup website. There's also V-Ray Express for SketchUp available for download on our site, which comes with a large material library, studio environments, lights, hdr images, everything you need to get up and running quickly.

That release date for 3.0 was a goal at some point. We certainly will try to get it out there asap, but until we are in beta for a while, I wouldn't get your hopes up.

You're going to need to provide example files for this most likely. This doesn't sound like a common issue. It would also be helpful to find out what version you're using. Have you tried contacting support@chaosgroup.com about it yet?

Yeah, it all depends on what you're shooting for. If an OpenGL game-like realtime presentation is what you're after, that's one thing. If you're going for photo realistic rendering, you'll want to go with someone like V-Ray, Maxwell, Thea, etc. Each has it's own strengths.

Make sure all installations of V-Ray for SketchUp are using the same version, including DR Spawners that you installed to render nodes.

at 30fps, that would be 900 frames. If each frame took 4 seconds, you'd be looking at about an hour's worth of render time total for that 30 second video.

it's a whole other side of the coin that I don't even think about anymore to be honest. I used to be a hardware geek, but these days I'm more of a software geek

so skgator99, I apologize for my AMD tirade, carry on. Please post specs of whatever you do end up building, so we can all have a mess to clean up ::nod::