great, and you sent it to vfswip@chaosgroup.com?

proxies are made from within V-Ray for SketchUp 1.6, or from other 3d apps that have the V-Ray plugin installed. Blender, Max, Maya, etc. The .vrmesh should be fully compatible from one V-Ray plugin to another. We don't have a repository of .vrmesh files to download, but we do bundle a conversion tool with our plugin that allows you to easily convert obj, geo, or ply files in to .vrmesh files to be used as proxies in any V-Ray product, without having to go through any sort of host application. Here's a video explaining proxies further:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQvP9idOijo

the post I made about sending bug reports says the bug reporting tool isn't working well at the moment for some people, so email is the best way to submit a report to our bug tracker. SketchUcation is NOT the place to report bugs for our product if you want us to actually fix them. We also don't want bug reports in the Chaos Group forums. Forums are a horrible place to sort out bugs. Threads get sidetracked/lost/confusing... oh it's a nightmare! So please send us an email with bug reports. If you want to give fellow VfS users a heads up about a problem, and discuss a bug on the forums, by all means, go ahead. If you're trying to tell myself, or Joe (the other VfS developer) about a bug, we need a bug report or else more than likely it's going to be lost. The email address for bug reports is vfswip@chaosgroup.com

proxies are fine, the workflow is a little confusing at first, but ValeroStudio has been able to work with them fairly well. We'll knock out some more bugs in the next beta release, check back with us then

you will have to uninstall 1.49.01 unfortunately.

Interesting... We should be starting the spawner as a hidden process. You won't see the window unless you manually start the spawner. You should see XMLDRSpawner in the list of processes in Task Manager when you start SketchUp with our plugin loaded. If not, please submit a bug report about this, and then try manually starting the spawner as thomthom suggests.

We brought the V-Ray Material from 3D Studio Max over to VfS (no you can't use a .mat file, we just brought the functionality of the material over to VfS), and I've heard reports of improved performance when using it. I would really recommend posting about this on the Chaos Group forums, so that Fernando can give you some tips about how to optimize the scene for 1.6.

Please send us a bug report that explains this issue, and also include the version of the plugin you are having conflicts with. We will try to address any comparability issues that we can.

If you haven't done so already, please send us a bug report about this. We haven't seen an out of memory error yet.

The RT render does not show a progress bar, because generally if you are using RT, you are trying to tweak materials or lighting, rather than producing a final render. It can produce a final result after a while, but generally it's used for previewing.

We have no known issues with Windows 8, and yes in the video the OS was most likely Windows 7.

anteolic - I believe another user has submitted a bug report that sounds similar. Could you please send us a bug report at vfswip@chaosgroup.com? We would like to hear details about your experience with this issue, to ensure that we rectify this for everyone's workflow.

@krisidious said:

Vray Beta is warning me when I open another instance of SketchUp that the program did not close properly and asks me to send a report. I believe this is happening because the other instance has not shut down.

When loading our plugin, we check our error log to see if we have our shutdown message printed in there. If we don't find it, we pop up the error message and ask you to submit a bug report. I'm told the bug report tool may be having issues... so... the error message is pointless at the moment...

If you are trying to convert a format other than obj or ply, then you won't be able to use the ply2vrmesh converter that we bundle with our plugin. So you will need to use another application to do the conversion to either an obj, ply, or a vrmesh. I'm not sure what costs would be associated with that, because it depends on what you decide to use to do the conversion. Using Blender and V-Ray for Blender may be free, I'm not certain though, I'm not involved with V-Ray for Blender, or marketing/sales for any of our products. In my opinion, installing and configuring Blender is a rather involved step if all you're looking for is a converter. Anyone try using MeshLab?

also, another quick note. Support for this, is US based (Eastern Standard Time, UTC -5), and is only Monday - Friday, 8am-4pm. If you try to contact anyone outside of that time frame, they will respond as soon as possible (typically within a couple hours unless they're slammed with questions about the beta). Your email gets fed in to a ticketing system, and will be addressed in the order it was received.

actually, reporting bugs on this forum, or the chaos group forum, is a complete waste of time, if your only goal is to alert us of the issue. I completely agree that double posting an issue is silly, so I recommend skipping the forum and just sending us the report directly. We have a bug tracker that we use to track issues. The forums are a great place to discuss workflow with other users, maybe some workarounds or show off your work, but if you're trying to tell us about a problem, the bug tracker is the best/only solution that is even remotely effective.

In the forum, threads go off topic, duplicate issues can't be linked, confidential information can't be shared, etc. It's just not the place for that sort of thing. vfswip@chaosgroup.com is how you can send a bug off to our bug tracker. We have a bug reporting tool that is built in to our plugin now, but ironically, it's not working right now, and it ranks low on the items to work on, so -sigh- it will likely not be in working order by the end of this beta. Anyway, for those of you who are having trouble, and feel this is your only outlet for communication with us, here is a copy and paste of our bug reporting thread:

How to submit a bug report
Hello everyone!

Thank you for participating in our beta testing process for V-Ray for SketchUp! We are looking forward to a swift and productive closed beta, followed by a public beta phase, and finally a release in the not so distant future. If you are using nightly builds, please keep all comments about those builds in our private forum and our bug tracker. We need as tight of a feedback loop as possible, and we need to stay focused on squishing any, and all bugs you encounter. To keep things simple, here's some basic ground rules for sending us reports. Discussing nightlies in this forum, will be confusing, as most of the users in this public beta forum, will be using stable builds, not nightly unstable builds.

If you encounter a bug and believe the bug has been reported already, report it anyway. We can link related reports together in our tracker so we can have a good idea of how many users are affected by a bug, and we can gather as much info as possible about the bug from different machine/os/workflow configurations. The more example scenes, screen shots, videos, bug descriptions, and steps to reproduce a bug, the easier it will be to accurately identify and repair an issue.

We now have a bug reporting tool (which I'm told is currently having issues...), so if it works for you, I would recommend using this tool. It can save you the trouble of filling out the template below, which we need if you email us a bug report. It can also save you the trouble of tracking down all of the assets that are related to your scene, when you send us example scene files that demonstrate your issue. The bug reporting tool can be found in the Plugin->V-Ray->Debugging->Report a Bug menu. We will try to get the tool fixed for anyone that is having trouble, as soon as we address some of the more pressing tasks on our list.

Alternatively, you can submit a new ticket by sending an email to:
vfswip@chaosgroup.com

PLEASE INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION WHEN SUBMITTING A BUG VIA EMAIL:
(otherwise we'll just end up asking you for it after you submit the bug anyway)

BETA BUILD VERSION!!!!
Operating system (xp 32-bit, vista-64bit, Mac OS X 10.6, etc)
SketchUp Version (Help->About SketchUp)
A description of the bug
Step by step description of how to reproduce the bug
Any screen shots or images that would help demonstrate or explain the bug
Any example scene files that could be used to diagnose the issue
A copy of your V-Ray for SketchUp Error log (C:\ProgramData\ASGVIS\VfS\vfs_stderr.txt or C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ASGVIS\VfS\vfs_stderr.txt)
Error messages (if any) that appear in the Ruby Console when the bug occurs
(You must have the SketchUp Ruby console open prior to the bug occurring to see these error messages)

Without this information, we won't have a clear picture of the situation surrounding the bug, and that can make the repair process very difficult, if not impossible. There are some bugs that may only occur when you don't use English as your primary language, or when you have a certain parameter set to a particular value. It's really hard to say what can cause a bug, so it really helps when we have all the information we need to diagnose the issue.

Thank you,
V-Ray for SketchUp Development Team

also, if anyone is having trouble reducing the in-scene representation, I would like to point out that we have a setting in our proxy export dialog, which allows you to set the number of triangles that we use to create our in scene representation. I'm not sure if there is an equivalent with the command line tool, but when doing it from within SketchUp, you should be able to limit the mesh complexity. In cases like this, where the viewport chugs, even editing the in scene representation can be difficult, so this allows you to skip that tedious step.

the viewport representation should be the only big holdup with the 32bit process. I've seen some excessive proxy usage render without issue. You can modify that in scene representation without effecting the render. The in scene representation is just used to show you position of the proxy, so you can edit that component and delete faces until it's a little easier to handle in the viewport. If you want, you can actually delete all of the faces, and replace it with 1 edge if you want. I tried doing that to have a field of grass where each blade was a proxy instance, but after about 400,000 instances, SketchUp started getting mad. It's probably better to have sod patch exported as a vrmesh, and then mod the viewport mod to be 1 edge.

I have yet to have an issue where I run out of memory with 1.6, and I've tried... so if anyone experiences that issue, and it's not just because you're trying to render at an extreme resolution (that's why we have the option to render to a vrimage), please submit a bug report so we can try to reduce our memory footprint or optimize our parsing process. Details on how to properly submit a bug report are outlined on the Chaos Group VFS beta forum.

There have been some changes in the V-Ray core, across all products, which may require some tweaking in order to get the exact same render as what you had in 1.49.01, and you should be able to achieve a reduced render time as well. I would suggest working with our in house expert, Fernando, on our forums, to see if you can find the culprit for the render time and render quality.

IES lights use the physically accurate information contained in the .ies file when the power is set to 0 (there should be an explanation of this in the tooltip for that parameter I believe). If you "increase" it to 1, then you're doing 2 things. You are setting the power of the light to an incredibly low number, and you are ruining the physically accurate representation of that light. Either render options needed to be adjusted, or there is something going on with that .ies file. If you believe it's a bug, please follow the instructions outlined in the beta testing forum on the chaosgroup website.

Nice render btw! I look forward to hearing more feedback about this build

good to hear, I look forward to seeing this bug in our bug tracker.

It's compatible with windows, and there is only a 32bit build of our plugin (as it always has been). SketchUp is also only 32bit.

or we could fix the problem... sign up for the beta, try it out, if the issue persists, report the bug, and we'll fix it. Beta is the best time to handle situations like this, so please, help us help you.