The slowdown could be caused by us monitoring the scene via the SketchUp Ruby API, as jiminy-billy-bob mentioned. If this is a common issue, then perhaps we should consider having an option to turn that off, rather than having to disable our entire plugin. RT wouldn't work while it's disabled... and there might be an issue with lights if it's disabled... not sure off hand what else would be impaired by not listening for component or face changes.

Archaholic - we certainly did consider exporting, like many other rendering packages out there. We decided against exporting, so that we wouldn't have to worry about syncing assets between 2 applications. We actually found that users often told us that one of the reasons they chose our product over a competitor's, is the fact that we were embedded in the host application. We just did what our users told us to do

I'll take that as a no

I haven't seen anyone on here discuss V-Ray Express for SketchUp. Is everyone aware it exists?

" • V-Ray Express: Users can easily access more than 200 materials and interchangeable lighting setups to create realistic studio scenes and illuminate models faster than ever. V-Ray Express is available separately on the downloads page."
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/news.html#newsid609

Just thought I'd mention it for anyone that is new to V-Ray, or has been looking for a solution like this.

I believe it's mostly because we just haven't gotten to it yet. As always, feel free to send in your feature requests, and we will add in whatever we have time for.

please contact support@chaosgroup.com about this issue. We would need more information in order to help. For example: the version of SketchUp, version of V-Ray for SketchUp you have installed, version of V-Ray for SketchUp you have a license for (double check you have the correct version installed for your license), Operating System, when did the issue first happen, what did you do just before this issue first occurred. Feel free to continue this thread, but I highly suggest you contact our support department also.

yes, you did request that, but we decided at the time that the built in SketchUp workflow should be sufficient.

the presets will only effect settings that it needs to. It will not reset all settings back to defaults, or to whatever the preset settings are. Output resolution for example, will not be changed when using the exterior camera preset. Just make a backup or your options by saving them to a vropt file, or backup your whole scene. Then play around with the presets a little, and if you decide you would rather return to the settings you had, you can either load your backed up vropt, or you can load up your backup skp file.

Some applications get weird about DPI, and just having a large image isn't going to work properly. I'd imagine Illustrator has a way to handle it, but I'm not that familiar with it these days, been over a decade since I've loaded that app up. On a computer screen there's really no difference between having a large image, zoomed out, and having a small image with a high DPI. DPI is describing something during the printing process, so it can get a little confusing when diddling about with this type of thing on a computer. Your computer screen has pixels, and the screen itself will have it's own pixel density (retina displays for example have 200-400 pixels per inch), regardless of what your image is set to be... so DPI or PPI (pixels per inch) can be a little... ::stares at ground:: perplexing. By default we render out at 72dpi, and we don't have a place to change that setting.

There should be a way to change the dpi of an image in photoshop. A quick google search found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT9j0O4kyrg

I use GIMP (it's essentially the same exact thing, except 100% free), and the dpi setting is found where you resize the image.

Hope that helps!

the presets are the drop down combo boxes at the top of the V-Ray Options editor. Just select a category from the first box, then a preset from the second box, and then click the green checkmark. Tada! Super easy scene setup for any occasion

did you check the download section of the Chaos Group website? There are materials available for download there, as well as the V-Ray Express installer that will load your material library up with a hefty bunch of materials as well.

It's the V-Ray Material from 3D Studio Max. It is a bit more optimized, compact, and I only hear good things from our artists who use it. If you want to use any of the optional maps that we have in our standard material, you can use the VRayBRDF which is just the V-Ray Material embedded in the Standard material as a layer. It's a little confusing, but that's the workflow at the moment.

It might help to use the new V-Ray Material that was made available in version 2.0.

that error message is happening because SketchUp has used up all available memory that it is allowed to use. All versions of SketchUp prior to 2015 have been 32bit applications, which are limited to 4gb of memory. SketchUp 2015 is available as 64bit, and is capable of using a great deal more memory. I would suggest visiting our help page about 64bit workflow: http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY2SKETCHUP/64+Bit+Workflow

I would also suggest upgrading to the latest version of both SketchUp and V-Ray for SketchUp, being able to utilize more than 4gb of ram while rendering is quite a big deal, especially for our users out there that have 16gb+ of ram in their workstations.

looks like there's an issue with your account permissions. Contact support@chaosgroup.com so we can fix that for you carconcal.

(not sure you really need to worry about this now that we have 64bit support though)

yeah our vrimg format supports layers, I don't know if exr does. If it does, I suppose it's possible. I'm not sure if other flavors of V-Ray support this. If they do, then it's definitely possible.

I don't have time to play with this scene at the moment, but as a heads up, there are more buttons than "override materials" in our options that could help track down your issue. You could toggle off reflections/refractions, maps, and displacement. Turning one of those off should speed up your render most likely, if it's true that using override materials speeds up the render time dramatically. Once you figure out which thing is slowing you down, you can go on a hunt for the offending material that is using whatever you toggled off.

it might be possible to have the 32bit version of 2015 installed, and have it work in both 2014 and 2015, but if you install 2015 64bit (which I entirely recommend), you can't have V-Ray in both 2014 and 2015. (why are you using 2014 32bit at all if you have 2015 64bit??)

Please use the "pack scene" feature when sharing scenes. It's possible the slowdown could be related to external assets such as IES profiles, high resolution textures, etc. I see in this case that Andy was able to reproduce the issue without the external assets, but I highly recommend sharing that way in the future.

No, we haven't benchmarked it, but we DID start the next development cycle...