andybot is spot on. Our current licensing system in VfS is a pretty big headache in certain situations. Some big companies have some very complicated security setups that prevent them from being able to license via the web, so then we have to juggle offline activation files around, and that gets messy. If you make any hardware changes to your computer, our current licensing will throw a hissy fit and tell you that you don't have a valid license anymore. Transporting a license from one machine to another is a grueling process.... the list goes on. Then on the positive side... you can activate for the first time, as soon as you purchase your license, and there's no extra hardware that you have to connect to a computer. That's about it though.

On the other hand, dongles allow us to still provide floating licenses, so you can have one dongle with 50 seats on it, and serve out those licenses to your whole office, just like the web based licensing allows. They allow you to move from one machine to another without a hitch. They allow you to modify your computer, or reinstall your OS without a problem. You don't have to worry about keeping track of that every so crucial email that has your serial number, like you do with the web based activation. Also, the dongle based licensing runs as a service without a problem from what I've heard.

I'll admit, I wasn't very excited about switching to dongles at first. I was not very fond of the idea of giving up a usb port. When my old development laptop died and I had to get a new one, I saw the value. I was up and running immediately, and I didn't even have to play around with our licensing database! Hooray! When I think of how many emails we get every week, from users that experience a similar situation, and now need us to add an exception to their license so they can re-activate on their machine that they modified in some way to invalidate their old license... I can really see the value. We typically will handle licensing related issues within 24 hours, but instantaneous is much faster!

Anyway, I can see both sides now. It's nice to be able to immediately activate your product, without having to wait a day or two for something in the mail. It's also nice to not have to wait up to 24 hours to use the product that was working fine yesterday, because your IT department modified your computer's hardware. When I really weigh it out though, I think I like the dongle based licensing much more (I never thought those words would come out of my mouth... or keyboard).

I'm not really privy to that kind of info. I didn't find out that the VfR release was going to be a paid upgrade until just before it was released. It all depends on what happens in this development cycle I suppose. Certain features required much more time and effort than others, and have a greater impact on the workflow of the product, so they may have some sort of upgrade fee associated with them. I doubt you will get any answer other than that from anyone here, until we have a better idea of where the product will be upon the time of release (in the middle of beta testing or something like that). You could always try asking on our forums, rather than SketchUcation. I believe I'm the only Chaos Group employee that ever posts here, so this question really won't get much visibility from us here.

We are trying to bring all of the features we added in the latest VfR update, over to VfS for this next update. From there we're hoping we'll be able to develop both products at the same time.

This will put some sparkle back in your eyes, I just saw the first render from the next update. My, how lovely that billboard Susan looks in the VFB again, how I missed her.

oh I know valerostudio, I was just a bit grumpy that day I think. Thanks for turning that frown upside down though You too Pyroluna, glad to hear you like what you see in VfR.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvOWlhZzq78 <-- Displacement water level tutorial. This will help you punch holes in the geometry.

I don't mean to burst your bubble, but that doesn't help us go any faster...

We had to spend a good bit of time converting our old Rhino plugin to work with our new codebase that we made during the last VfS development cycle. We also had to adapt to use some of the systems that CG use, which then made making builds of VfS not an option while we were working on the latest VfR update. Once VfS is working with the new systems, buggy beta builds can start getting cranked out. Once the buggy builds are working well enough for a standard user to do anything more than load our plugin and immediately click render, we can start having beta testers play with it. We don't need much help finding the huge obvious problems that come from switching major things in our codebase, but once we are at a point where you can actually use the product again, that's when the fun will begin.

On the plus side, I am currently able to load up VfS and license it without a headache. It immediately crashes after that point... but hey, at least it builds and licenses!

I wonder if the OP ever read any of this...

I've threatened to update it a few times now. It does have some use, but in the end it's just the material editor with a larger preview. If there was an online repository that could have materials submitted to it like the google warehouse, then it would have more of a purpose. Given it's current level of functionality though, it falls fairly low on the list of priorities. I believe it was made before 1.05.29 was released, so it definitely needs some love soon if it's going to continue to survive. The vrimage tool was updated after the latest VfS release, so it should work fine with VfS generated vrimages.

I don't believe our lens effects hit the render time much or at all. You will definitely have to use Photoshop (or Gimp if you don't like spending money) in the meantime though.

Lens Effects will be added in the next update. You can see the result in our latest update to V-Ray for Rhino: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itk_EJSyJwc

correct, as thomthom reiterated, our product is available in your country, but you will have to use a different reseller. Visual Dynamics is not allowed to resell to certain locations, but there are other local resellers that can accommodate your request.

Ecuadorian - You are referring to the message posted on vray.com. That website is not a part of our company, it's just a reseller named Visual Dynamics LLC, that is based in Springdale, Arkansas in the United States. V-Ray is a product that is made by Chaos Group, which is based in Sofia, Bulgaria. V-Ray for SketchUp is made by the US office, which is based in Baltimore, Maryland, which is in the United States, but again, is not related to Visual Dynamics in any way. Please check the Chaos Group website to locate a reseller near you to purchase V-Ray for SketchUp (http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/purchase.html?pID=10).

vray.com was purchased by someone that has NOTHING to do with Chaos Group, V-Ray, ASGvis, etc. They are just a reseller like the rest of the resellers out there. ASGvis also distributed it's products via resellers, but in addition to that, sold the products it made itself. This was unfair for our resellers though, and caused a lot of complications. Product creation and product sales are often separated, although it's less common in the world of software, it's still a common practice. We aren't really set up to handle worldwide sales, taxes, shipping, etc. That's all unnecessary overhead, which can be handled by local resellers much more efficiently.

To purchase our product, we recommend you use our website to locate a local reseller that can help you. It's not realy complicated, all you have to do is click the Purchase button at the top of our site, and then choose V-Ray for SketchUp from the drop down list. (or click this link: http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/purchase.html?pID=10).

People often get confused and think that vray.com is part of Chaos Group... I really wish that company hadn't decided to use or product's name for their domain name... that is a very sneaky and misleading way of attracting business.

You can post in the public forums if you haven't purchased a license. You can find documentation about V-Ray on our documentation site: http://www.spot3d.com/. You can find video tutorials on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE2F8B612F375E98E&feature=plcp. The manual is out of date, but covers the basics of how our product works. Better documentation is needed, we are aware, but we haven't had the time/resources to revamp it yet. We just merged with Chaos Group, so now we aren't a small company anymore, hooray! We are hoping to be able to dedicate some resources to getting some better documentation out there for our users some time in the near future, stay tuned for updates.

I'm surprised 3ds worked better than the collada format (*.dae), I thought that was supposed to be the end all be all format these days.

I'm not the best representative of the entire company, I really only get to see a small window of what's going on. I get to see a list of bugs from customers, and a list of requirements from those above me. I just program and try to keep as best of a pulse on what's going on as I can.

ASGvis, when it existed, was able to resell it's own product, which allowed us to play around with numbers some, but the underlying pricing scheme was always based upon the way Chaos Group did things. When 2.0 came out and RT came out, they charged for an upgrade. Now we are at the point where RT is working in our plugin core (with VfR at least). It's all still in the air though. I haven't heard any talk of definite pricing, licensing, etc. We are still at the point where we are trying to figure out what we need to tackle, when, how, and how long it will take. I wasn't told the final price of the VfR upgrade until the day of release, so I'm really not the best person to talk to about that kind of stuff.

Tom - I understand the frustration, we will do our best to make our next release worthwhile, regardless of the pricing or feature set. We have made tons of fixes and optimizations already, it should be exciting to see what else we can improve.

If it were up to me, I'm not sure if I'd opt to spend the time ripping features out of the current implementation of our product so that we could put out a bugfix patch, or if I'd spend that time to get the current features in VfS. Both options would probably take a similar amount of time, and each have their pros and cons, so it's a tough call.

There is definitely not a beta version floating around, I can squash that rumor right now. As far as the dongle, they fix some problems, and create very few. The ability to just take your license with you so you can work from home without a complicated VPN setup, or to transfer your license to a freshly reformatted computer without having to contact our friendly neighborhood Keith Thompson for an activation reset. The downside, there is a cost for this piece of hardware, and you have to wait for it to be shipped to you. On the flip side, how much time has our existing licensing system cost you? For some, you may not have experienced a single problem, but for anyone with a complicated setup at work, or anyone that has upgraded or modified their computers, you know how much dongles could help.

I have no part in deciding pricing or anything of that sort, but I would say that the features that were added to VfR in this last development cycle, should prove to be quite useful. I hope everyone is happy with the way the product turned out. We are pretty pleased with it ourselves, and we look forward to bringing these fixes and improvements to VfS.

When you go to print, you're mainly going to be concerned with dpi. By default I believe that most image editing apps will set the dpi to 72. For print, you're going to want to set this to somewhere around 300, but it all depends on the capability of the printer you are going through, so you had better ask them what dpi they are looking for. The output from our product should be at 72 dpi I believe. So yes, you are going to have to set a larger output size, and then set the dpi to something much higher in Gimp (or Photoshop if you prefer). This will give the visible effect of the image appearing to be resized to a smaller resolution, but you should notice that you can zoom in to the image until it's the same size on screen as it was prior to the change, and there will be no hit to the quality of the image as there normally would be if you actually resized the resolution of the image. That's because all you are changing, is how much image data gets crammed in to a given area of your screen (or print), rather than modifying the image size and losing some of the image data.