yeah, I don't know how much of a difference that 20% slowdown makes in a real world situation. I just render scenes that customers send us when our support guys are baffled. or to verify a bug is fixed. I guess that 1 minute difference would equate to a pretty big difference for a longer render, and so the extra 30% cost would pay for itself after 1 or 2 jobs. I guess the same could be said for the crazy expensive $2,000+ intel chips. If you can shave a minute or two off a little render, then it will pay for itself after a few big renders.

@andybot said:

space and power get to be a consideration once you have many boxes... also noise, heat. Additionally, you have to consider that node licensing has changed with vray 3.0 - you have to pay for nodes now, so it make sense in that regard to have fewer machines (thinking ahead at least ). @ Devin: I don't know if you realize that AMD cores =/= Intel cores. Intel uses hyperthreading, so you pretty much get double the cores in terms of processing power. I.e. - 4 cores Intel = 8 cores AMD, more or less.

Yeah, I'm aware that amd cores != intel cores. I believe that we charge per every 10 render nodes if I recall correctly, so yes, there is an additional cost (which could be covered by not purchasing a $3,000 cpu). Like I said, I haven't really done any benchmarks, and my job doesn't really involve rendering a ton, I just write the plugin, and talk to you nice folks

Heat, noise, power consumption, etc. I remember back before we had our in house render farm enclosed in a proper server room... Granted, we had a farm of 30+ rack mounted nodes, and not just a couple machines sitting around, but it can still be an issue with a handful I guess. I think one of our developers here has 5 computers at his desk alone, 6 when he brings in his laptop, 7 when he brings in his other one, so I don't think of <10 machines as a big issue.

@jiminy-billy-bob said:

@dkendig said:

personally I wouldn't go with either one, I would get an AMD. Their benchmarks are pretty much the same, but the price point is ridiculously lower than any comparable intel chip.

::ducks to avoid the flame war::

Regardless of pure performance, he stated that he wants to use this machine with Vray. And in a few months you should be releasing v3, right? Which means Embree, right? Which means Intel, right?

Right?

I don't know any benchmark info at all for our product unfortunately, and I can't say exactly what V-Ray for SketchUp 3.0 will or will not have at this point, or how it will benchmark on a given configuration, it's still kind of early in the dev cycle.

AFAIK any high end cpu (intel or amd) that supports SSSE3, SSSE4, SSSE4.2, or AVX... which should be able to use Embree.

nope, not available yet. Not sure if it ever will be either, because a vrmesh could come from any product, and could have a poly count beyond what SketchUp can handle.

@jeff hammond said:

@dkendig said:

personally I wouldn't go with either one, I would get an AMD. Their benchmarks are pretty much the same, but the price point is ridiculously lower than any comparable intel chip.

::ducks to avoid the flame war::

he has $7g though.
you're supposed to spend his money, not save it

Yeah, hard to wrap my head around having that budget for just one machine I guess. I can't say how our product performs in a production environment for any particular configuration. I use a macbook pro that's a year or two old, and a desktop I built (amd based) for DR or RT rendering. I don't get too fancy when rendering for my own testing purposes. If I had 7k, I'd build a little 3-4 computer render farm. I haven't tested it myself, but I would think that having 3 or 4 machines contributing to the render job would be better than paying 4-5x to get 2x performance boost. It also depends on what you're rendering. If you're doing more quick renders than big slow renders, then the network lag on DR would probably have an impact on performance when dealing with the farm. Otherwise I would think that having the farm would be the way to go.

One AMD FX-9590 Eight-Core (score 10,194) is $219.95
One Intel Core i7-5960X (score 16,905) is $1,011.99... so there's some improvement here, it's nearly 7,000 higher in the benchmark score (not sure how that relates to V-Ray though)... but you have to pay about 500% for that little bump...

I'm also confused why intel server chips (xeon) are listed... but no AMD (opteron)... not sure why they would be omitted...

So for a benchmark that is actually related to what we do, here are benchmarks for 3D Studio Max using Mental Ray: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2013/-26-3DS-Max-2012,3161.html

Again I'm seeing under $200 for AMD, and over $350 for intel, with similar benchmark scores.

Granted, you have a huge budget, and you already have a render farm, so by all means, go on and get the absolute latest and greatest processor you can find (or a few of them for that matter). Like I said, I just have never had that kind of budget for one workstation.

personally I wouldn't go with either one, I would get an AMD. Their benchmarks are pretty much the same, but the price point is ridiculously lower than any comparable intel chip.

::ducks to avoid the flame war::

@chon said:

Nobody from Chaos to answer ?

::crosses arms:: This isn't even our forum!

@chon said:

1. First of all, why in the V2.XX, VRayForSU assigns material color IDs automatically by default ? I think it was more useful with one ID color (black) by default and manually assigning Color IDs on materials we just wanted to...

Someone requested random ID colors, but I agree, there should be a way to disable it.

if you still have trouble, shoot an email over to support@chaosgroup.com. We should be able to figure it out.

SketchUp 8 is not officially supported by any of the latest versions of V-Ray for SketchUp, you are behind by quite a bit, and now there's even a 64bit version of SketchUp 2015, which I believe anyone will agree, is the version of SketchUp you want to have if you're going to be using any heavy hitting plugins such as V-Ray. If you want to use our product in SketchUp 8, your best best is to try using the 32bit demo for SketchUp that is just called sketchup_win. I'm not entirely sure that it will work, since a lot as changed since SketchUp 8, but you can give it a try.

@3dita said:

@dkendig said:

PROTIP: If you ever find that you need to charge a client a few extra hours because they've been naughty, be sure to use 100% white in at least one material while rendering.

LOL.. Care to elaborate?

sure

@unknownuser said:

Do not apply perfectly white or very close to white materials to a majority of the objects in the scene, as this will cause excessive render times. This is because the amount of reflected light in the scene will decrease very gradually and the light cache will have to trace longer paths. Also avoid materials that have one of their RGB components set to maximum (255) or above.

http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY2SKETCHUP/Light+Cache#LightCache-Notes

PROTIP: If you ever find that you need to charge a client a few extra hours because they've been naughty, be sure to use 100% white in at least one material while rendering.

What version are you trying to install? Do you have a dongle?

please contact support@chaosgroup.com. Our support guys should be able to step you through this.

@unknownuser said:

Why is this not mentioned on the download page ?

it does say it on the download page:

@unknownuser said:

V-Ray for SketchUp Demo Limitations

• Distributed Rendering limited to 2 render nodes
• produces watermarked images
• resolution up to 600x400
• rendered results limited to 4 lights

That should be working with the latest service release...

@wawmsey7 said:

Using sketchup to create complex dynamic components isn't unusual so vray should definitely work out how to cater for this.

Like I said, we can probably figure out a way to turn off some functionality such as monitoring scene changes constantly. This is the first complaint I've heard about this afaik, I'll keep a lookout for any other slowdowns that are a result of our presence, perhaps there's a simple solution.

@wimve said:

But I seem only be able to use four lights in the demo mode. Is this correct ?
Be it omni directional or spotlight.

Yes, I believe that is a demo limitation, and it sounds like you're rotating the correct object. So you had a spot light pointing straight down, and then tried rotating it, but it continued to render pointing downward. Was this in a scene with more than 4 lights? Are you able to reproduce this issue in a scene with only 1 light?

we could enable/disable certain functionality of our plugin on the fly, sure, but SketchUp won't let us unload without restarting SketchUp, so that's on the Trimble guys...

wawmsey7 - it's necessary to keep tabs on everything in the scene at all times, because we have our own internal representation of the SketchUp scene, which allows us to update a realtime render in pretty much real time, because we don't have to crawl through the SketchUp scene to figure out what is going on. We are working with the Trimble developers to find a better solution, but so far this is the best we have. If you don't modify nested components a lot, then you will likely never see us slowing anything down. In my opinion, a rendering plugin shouldn't be hogging up system resources (like TIG said), unless it's going to be used. So if you find it too much of a bother, just temporarily disable us (you won't hurt our feelings, I promise) and turn us back on later when you're ready to light/texture/render your scene.

.mat is a 3d studio max format. You want a .vrmat or .vismat format. There are quite a few available for download on the Chaos Group website, as well as V-Ray Express for SketchUp, which will give you a nice library of V-Ray materials and lighting/studio scenes to import and play with. Not sure if you will have full access to these resources until after you purchase a license, but either way, you need to use a .vrmat or .vismat.

I bet you're rotating the geometry of the light, rather than the light group. The v-ray information is attached to the group of the light, not the geometry. If you are opening the group and rotating the geometry, the light will not move. You can completely manipulate the geometry inside of that v-ray light group, and it will have no effect on the render at all.