kalu - I believe that there are licensing restrictions on some of the textures used for some materials, which prevent us from giving them away for free (this was the case with the Arroway materials I believe). It's not hard to make a material, and we provide plenty of documentation and tutorials on how to do it. If we made the life of a beta tester too easy, we would never find any bugs.

CPU rendering with RT will result in the same image that you would get from a regular render, but as Andy said, it is sort of like progressive path tracing, so you can see a fairly decent result (enough to get a sense of illumination, color, etc) immediately. The longer it cooks, the better it looks. If you move the camera, it restarts, but again, you have a decent result immediately (no parsing time, no waiting at all). Move a light or an object in the scene, again, updates immediately. GPU support is something we want to add for this release if we have time for it, but we don't want to rush it in to the product and end up with an unstable build. We are all pretty fond of the way this build is working at the moment. FYI, if you use the GPU to render, there are some limitations: http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/rt100/unsupported_features.htm, and that is due to the way you have to interact with the GPU. All of the V-Ray plugins have to be translated in to a shader language that the GPU can work with, and some of our features just don't translate well or at all. RT CPU will have none of these limitations, RT GPU will. That's one of the reasons we chose to integrate RT CPU first.

thank you Matt

There are new tutorials for our public beta that started today!
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/vrayforsketchup_beta.html

CadFather - You should probably contact support@chaosgroup.com about that error. I doubt the application went through at all if you received an error.

Holmes1977 - no worries, you had good reason to complain! I hope we managed to meet or exceed your expectations. I expect an equal amount of praise related posts to counter all the complaints! ::crosses arms:: j/k

you could try using proxies...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UQvP9idOijo

ValeroStudio just posted an image on our beta forums, using proxies for grass. Matt, would you like to show it off here? You can now!

Not just a beta, but also updated documentation, tutorials, pricing info, and a projected final release date. A beta like we've never done before for VfS. One of the most frustrating obstacles with our previous betas, was a general lack of documentation. New features were announced, but at the beginning of beta, there were no details on how to use them. Changes were announced, but now how they really changed workflow, or why. Now there is all of that, and more! We are very excited to see everyone's response to this latest version, we think that it will be received well.

I can confirm everything JD Hill has said, V-Ray is using the Sketchup::Entities observer to track scene changes for RT updates, which is why we are having this headache. You can temporarily disable the observer by running this:

entsList = [Sketchup.active_model.active_entities];Sketchup.active_model.definitions.each{|deff| entsList.push deff.entities};entsList.each{|ents| ents.remove_observer VRayForSketchUp.entity_observer}

Then if you decide to enable it again, run this:

entsList = [Sketchup.active_model.active_entities];Sketchup.active_model.definitions.each{|deff| entsList.push deff.entities};entsList.each{|ents| ents.add_observer VRayForSketchUp.entity_observer}

Restarting SketchUp will result in restoring the observer as well.

in the upcoming beta, you will have the ability to just right click on the light group and convert it to a component. So that will make this a little easier to do in the future. A light list would be helpful though, I can understand that request.

we bundle the C++ redistributable with our installer, I don't see why this is necessary at all unless you installed V-Ray without having those redistributables checked in our installer (it's checked by default)

RT relies upon the DR Spawner, so it will utilize a farm, yes.

that's SketchUp trying to dump out a crash dump, but it's failing because the app is completely out of ram, and is crashing in a very spectacular manner (this is something that commonly happens when SketchUp runs out of ram, so don't worry, you didn't do anything wrong, there is no danger). SketchUp is a 32bit application, and can't surpass 4gb of contiguous memory. Typically 3.5 is about as far as I've seen anyone go. Since our plugin is tied to the SketchUp process (which is 32bit), our plugin + SketchUp combined can't use more than 4gb of contiguous ram.

The dynamic memory limit parameter is in regards to dynamic geometry such as Displacement. Pumping that value up won't help you avoid a crash in this case. Just render to a VRImage directly, and if necessary, turn down your output resolution.

Both of the developers for our plugin were helping you actually. Both Joe and Myself. The entire issue was caused by us being unable to write our error log out to the folder where we normally put it. So we just changed the path to your user folder and it started working just fine.

As a quick heads up, and to save you any additional frustration, our manual is a tad outdated (it's about 3 versions old). So the manual will give you a good idea of where to get started, but you should also have a look at our youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE2F8B612F375E98E

our flavor of RT doesn't support the GPU yet. Heads up guys.

valerostudio - nah, just pump out some nice renders and shout about us from a mountaintop.

panixia - we haven't added support for layer or texture animation yet, no.

thomthom - I have a feeling that video was released by accident, or for a specific purpose. Not for announcing the new version.

glad we could get you up and running today. Sorry about the weird file permission issue. We'll have that ironed out in the next release.

First I've heard of this... well at least someone sort of gave you a sneak peak. Yeah Lens Effects are in there valerostudio, just like how we have them in V-Ray for Rhino.

I'm glad you like what you've seen so far. They didn't really scratch the surface from what I could tell. Sure, there's issues, but yeah it has some stuff that can be tested. There are some things that we know are broken and need to be worked on, so we could wait a bit longer and just work on what we know about too. ::shrugs:: Sounds like a good plan to me either way. I don't make these decisions, I just write code. What I'm doing right now won't require user feedback until after I'm done implementing it in at least a basic form, which might take a couple of days.

I don't know anything about V-Ray for Blender, but if they're VRMesh files, then yes, they will be compatible as far as I know.

Your frustration is understandable, and actually I'm glad to hear you're so eager to use our product that you hopped on here and tried to get some help from the users on here. They are a great resource to any V-Ray for SketchUp user, new or old.