Please contact Chaos Group U.S.A. for support for any important issues.

don't forget to register on the Chaos Group forums, all of the content from our old ASGvis forums have been migrated to the new Chaos Group forums. If you have trouble registering, or you can't see all of the content on the forum, please contact support@chaosgroup.com so we can get your account straightened out.

correct, we don't pay attention to layer visibility changes in the current version.

Yup, that's another option too. I have the old subdivide and smooth plugin, and will likely upgrade to artisan when I start playing with SketchUp some more. Right now I'm in Rhino mode though, so I believe this was the first time I've used the subdivide and smooth plugin since 1.49.01 of VfS was released. That test sphere took a lot longer to make than it should have. I'm getting rusty

Here's my test scene and a render using the UV Tools plugin.

Scene (had to compress it)

I just use the free UV Tools plugin for spherical mapping: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=23725 I suppose we could just "borrow" from this plugin or figure out another way to do it on our own, but this plugin does a great job with spherical mapping already.

V-Ray for SketchUp will work with all UV mapping that you can do in the app... except for textures that have been manipulated using the "distort" uv mapping tool. To get that to work you have to "make the texture unique" option when right clicking the geometry that has distorted uv mapping. We support the "rotate", "shear", and "move" uv mapping tools without a problem though.

@unknownuser said:

I just hope a VfSU 2.0 teaser comes out soon to get me excited again.

Well I believe the next release of VfR will be the teaser you're looking for. We don't really have time to diddle around with media hype, we're busy making the product

No, the restrictions aren't going away any time soon, but it really isn't all that difficult to register. It was a pain at first, due to the normal complications that come from merging two forums/companies/workflows together, but we haven't really seen any trouble with the registration or posting process over the past couple of months. I think the initial change just scared or confused a lot of people, and they never bothered trying again after the issues were fixed. I actually prefer the new forum over the old ASGvis one. Our old forum was a tad unstable and flaky.

No problem guys. I've been kind of quiet lately because I've been busy programming I was told I spend too much time on the forums, and I have to say I agree. I typically tried to just do some forum hopping while waiting for a build to finish or the host application to start up ::drools:: but more often than not, I'd end up typing up a small book, like my previous response, and really if I'm going to be typing anything of that length, it should probably be code. So I've been trying really hard to not post responses to anything. I always feel like I have to chime in when users start running about saying the sky is falling though In all seriousness though, please start posting stuff on the Chaos Group forums, it's difficult enough to keep tabs on one forum, but two... three... four... that's just too many. If you post it, they will come...

First, I would like to address this proposed road map. Here it is:
1.)Get VfR up to speed with VfS
2.)Put out a new version of VfS that has bug fixes from the latest changes in VfR
3.)Start doing simultaneous releases of VfR and VfS
4.)Start adding in all of the 3D Studio Max features that we can possibly cram in to our VfS and VfR implementations.

I don't consider this a closely guarded secret, and I've said this many times before. If you're looking for a more broken down view, then I'm sorry, we don't have one. I can't tell you exactly when we will be adding realtime to SketchUp. I can't even pin it down to a month, release version... year... All I can really say is that item #1 on this list is almost done, and then we are going to be working towards item #2 after that, and so on (unless we are instructed to do otherwise). I can clear up some other confusion though...

1.) Chaos Group does not consider VfS and VfR to be any more or less valuable than any other V-Ray products, that's why we were acquired in the first place. We used to be our own company, and simply licensed the V-Ray engine from Chaos Group. Now we are a part of Chaos Group. Same 2 developers, same 2 products, just a different name. If you spoke to Chaos Group at any point, and they had no clue about our product, it's because they really didn't have anything to do with our product until they bought our company. Even now there are some details that may not have been completely communicated to them, or us for that matter. We are working towards closing the gap though, to avoid any misinformation or confusion in the future.

2.) We have access to V-Ray core code that we didn't have access to in the past. We will hopefully be able to get to the bottom of the DR related issues with access to the code, along with a bunch of other bugs that we have basically had our hands tied with, due to lack of source code.

3.) SketchUp is a 32bit process, that's why V-Ray for SketchUp is also 32bit. We are a plugin that is inside of SketchUp, not an external process you export to. We have a workaround in progress that will allow you to basically export your render to a 64bit process, which is how the other guys get around that problem. Of course it would be optimal if SketchUp would just put out a 64bit build of their product... but I'm not holding my breath for that one...

4.) The Chaos Group forums are "dead" because everyone is posting here rather than there... Of course it's not very busy... We still have lots of visitors, but if you just browse and not contribute, then the forum will always be empty...

5.) The latest release wasn't a huge step forward from our old version, because we rewrote our entire plugin. If we changed the inner workings AND the UI AND added tons of new features, then there would be no solid way to test to see if the new inner workings are any better than the old ones. Yes there are new bugs, but for the most part the latest version is better than the old version, and fixed a number of bugs that existed in the previous version. We know this because people who were familiar with our old UI were able to pick up the latest version and test it against the older version. Now our UI is based entirely in Python and XML, which makes it MUCH easier to modify later on. The big hurdle we had to overcome, was all of the back end stuff that needed to be changed to allow this to happen.

I understand that there are other render engines coming out every day. That's fine, competition is good! By all means check out the competition, and if you want, you can let us know why they're better. It might give us a hint of what direction to go in for the future. We are aware there are bugs in the current release. We have fixed a lot of them during our VfR development process. Once both plugins are up and running and we can get to the point where we do simultaneous releases of both products (that's item #3). Fix a bug in one product, it's fixed in the other too. Add a feature to one product, and tada, it's in the other product too.

We completely agree with the changes that have been suggested
-make it 64bit
-make it less buggy
-make the UI a bit more useable
-make it easier
-add new features
-make it as good as the max plugin if we're going to charge the same price for both

In fact, that's pretty much what we were told right after we were purchased by Chaos Group. It was a short meeting. They told us we should do these things, and then we agreed and said we were already on it. I don't take any offense from anything said in this thread, it's more of a confirmation of things we already know. I'm actually glad that everyone is ready for the next release, and that everyone is buzzing about new features and changes. That's fantastic! I really hope our next version will bring some things to the table that you have all requested and hoped for over the past few years.

I'm going to go back to item #1 now. Stay tuned for more updates, I think we're pretty close to moving to item #2.

Thank you!

If you are using version 1.48.66 or later, you can fix this issue by deleting your vfs preferences ini file. It's located in
Windows 7:
C:\ProgramData\ASGVIS

Windows XP:
c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ASGVIS

OSX:
/Library/Preferences/Qt/ASGVIS

This file is responsible for remembering window size and position, as well as a few other settings behind the scenes. You could also edit the file so that only the part responsible for the options window's position gets removed, but it's easier to just remove the whole thing.

This issue should not occur in 1.49.01, so if you are using that version, we would appreciate it if you could send us a bug report about this issue: vfswip@asgvis.com

you need the converter tool that's listed here? http://spot3d.com/vray/misc/tools/vsketchup.html In the future, I would recommend using the Chaos Group forums when you really need support for V-Ray for SketchUp, I believe this question has been answered before on those forums. SketchUcation is great for users interacting with each other, but if you need some sort of technical support for the product, I would really recommend that you ask the folks that make it, in addition to asking everyone on this forum

The old forums are migrated, but are not visible if your account hasn't been properly registered on the chaos group site. Contact our support department if you are not able to see all of the old forums in the new chaos group website.

nope, no road map, sorry. Just keep an eye on the Chaos Group newsletters and website. There will not be a V-Ray for SketchUp update until after we have finished with the new version of V-Ray for Rhino, so keep an eye out for that release, as it should mark the end of the current development cycle. The goal of this round of updates, was to switch to a new rewrite of our core. Once it's in place for Rhino and SketchUp, we can start tweaking the plugin some more, and adding more features.

Thanks andybot and valerostudio ::sips frappucino:: mmmm... Okay, that's enough of this today, I wrote my huge chunk of text for the day, time to get back to programming!

Trust me, if we stop developing our product, you'll know. It's not just going to fizzle out and die. The V-Ray for Rhino community felt abandoned the same way you do now, when we spent all of our development time on V-Ray for SketchUp. I constantly had to battle against them, because they would always say "the product is dead" or "the product isn't being developed anymore" or something along those lines. It's totally not the case. Guys... do you realize that there are 2 people in our office that actually develop this product? Me and Joe... that's it. We have one person doing support, Keith. He's been a bit swamped lately, because he gets 50-100 emails a day (it used to cap out at about 30 per day prior to the merger) that he has to respond to. A lot of the emails we get are pretty much like this thread. Users that are confused or concerned about the product's future. I'm sorry we haven't been more vocal. We it's difficult to have time to communicate with users and develop at the same time. Yesterday I ended up wasting a good hour or two on the forums, having this very same discussion on our forums. By the end of it, our whole office (me, Joe, Keith, Corey, Fernando, and Liz) was in an uproar... total waste of time. I should have just ignored the user on the forums entirely, and just spent my time developing.

I understand being concerned, and I understand if any users out there were or still are frustrated by the merger. What I don't understand, is if you do love the product, and love(d) the community... why would you work so hard to convince people that it's all over? There's no evidence of this at all... In fact... I have been adding proxy support for the past couple weeks, so not only are there updates heading over to SU in the future, but there are going to be big updates with some nice features added. We are currently working on getting some things ready for Siggraph next month, and we might actually get the tasks we wanted to finish, done in time, so we're pretty excited about that! In addition, there has been increased activity on the CG forums, and we now have a company blender that we can use to make delicious frappuccinos (caffine = energy to do more work). So I would say that things have done anything but calm down and die off.

There are some policies that need to be tweaked a bit on the Chaos Group website. We had a different business model than they did, so it's taking them time to adjust, and to add all of our content to their site. The forum software switched from smf to vbulletin, so migrating the forum was a royal pain, and yes there were some issues that occurred, but it certainly could have been worse. We could have been forced to start fresh, and lose all of the knowledge and helpful information that was on our forums prior to the migration. That would have been terrible. So I'm happy that we were able to salvage all of our old content. It's unfortunate that there were some user permission issues... but it happens. There are bugs sometimes, our beta testers should be very familiar with that concept by this point .

We don't plan on going anywhere, this company is fantastic and this product is fantastic. Chaos Group wanted to acquire us because we were doing well, not because we were doing poorly. We have been getting pressure to step up our game and crank out more features in shorter time frames, and thanks to our new plugin core, this is completely possible. We look forward to a bright and shiny future, and can't wait to finish V-Ray for Rhino so we can start rolling out updates for both products on a regular basis. I hope the users that have been running around saying the sky is falling will come to their senses soon, these discussions are very frustrating sometimes.

As long as you can communicate with the spawner, it will work. I've used DR over a VPN without any trouble. Just be aware that the scene assets need to be transferred to the spawners, and an internet connection is nothing compared to a 1gb/s local network. There's also tons of little problems that could pop up that would prevent communication with the spawners from working properly. So will it work? Sure! Is anyone at Chaos Group going to help you if you have trouble with it? No, it's not something that is supported by their support team.

@unknownuser said:

...... no idea whats going on here

There's a bug... that's what's going on!

Yeah, we're still working on VfR. We're hoping to have it in good working condition by Siggraph, but we'll see how things go. If you think we're being quiet, you should ask us questions on our forum