no problem

VRay (and i imagine many other renderers) is sensitive to what color is on what side of the material. to check whether my normals look like they should, in Styles window i change the Back Color to some bright neon color and then inspect the model in Monochromatic view.

it's not my invention, i read about this technique somewhere on the internet (might have been even this forum), but it's a good idea and deserves to be shared.

screenshot (click to enlarge):
[xxl-img:1oo797m5]http://i.imgur.com/E9Ftc.png[/xxl-img:1oo797m5]

hello all,

who here uses HDRi maps in their Sketchup + VRay renderings?

i made a quick comparison between the HDRi lighting and VRay Sky lighting (with both of them using a HDRi texture in the BG slot in Environment tab), and the attached screenshots are what i came up with.

i am more and more persuaded that the combination of VRay Sky as the light source with an HDRi image as the background is the best option available, both in terms of workflow and speed - the HDRis' various resolutions require a lot of guessing of exposure and IM&LC settings, their final lighting quality is still questionable and they take more time to render at same settings.

however, it may be that i'm doing something wrong, so if anyone had any tips about HDRi workflow, my ears are open.

the screenshots:
[xxl-img:3kozemj7]http://i.imgur.com/icppd.png[/xxl-img:3kozemj7]
[xxl-img:3kozemj7]http://i.imgur.com/1szP8.png[/xxl-img:3kozemj7]

imho both issues could be related to the face normals being inverted.

i would try selecting the faces, right clicking and choosing 'Reverse Faces' and see if the problem disappeared.

so, i decided that the easiest way of sharing the material evolution is to share the .skp file... here you go.

in short, the rearmost row and the middle row have the same materials, but balls in the rearmost row have normals facing inwards.
then, from left to right, only the Reflection color increases - 0, 10, 30, 60, 255.
the foremost row has reflection color set to Fresnel, with the Parallel color set to black (0) and the Perpendicular color increasing in the same sequence from 0 to 255.
the two balls in front show what happens when i start messing around with the Refraction Transparency color.

in addition i made a render with caustics to see which one is the best looking material... i'm attaching that render too.

i hope someone will find it useful; it was good for me, because i tested all the combinations and their outputs, so it will be harder for me now to forget what does what

glasstests-reflection.skp

yes,

i'll add tomorrow the material settings and how i got to its values.

hello,

i've been playing a little bit with glass in vray, and i've come up with the following summary of how the window glass behaves. I must say, that the simplest way (extruded face) gives the most satisfactory results. it looks the same as the 2 separate panes with opposite normal directions, but it's easier to build

Also, the glass panes were first grouped and the material was assigned to the group as a whole.

the sketchup view on the left is Monochromatic, with dark pink as the color of the 'dark' side

~e

[xxl-img:2fu5b0ql]http://i.imgur.com/kodcV.jpg[/xxl-img:2fu5b0ql]

thanks both of you for letting me know; it somehow feels better knowing that i'm not alone in this )

guess we'll have to keep ctrlaltdeleting until the new VRay then.

could it be resolved by turning on or switching the type of the antialiasing filter in Image Sampler?

technically speaking: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wz223b1z.aspx

if you are using the latest Sketchup, then this is enabled in the program itself in its source code. you may also have a look at the [url=http://dwf.blogs.com/beyond_the_paper/2009/04/enabling-3gb-switch-on-windows-vista.html:1e0ac82v]3GB switch[/url:1e0ac82v].

and i'm sorry, i don't have any ideas to help you with your actual problem, as i am not familiar with sketchyphysics you'll have to wait for someone else to show up.

sorry, i forgot to mention that when the VRay Options dialog is open (and/or the vray material editor) the probability of this happening is much smaller in my case.

hi everybody,

i just thought i'd ask if anyone is having the same issue with VFB as i am.

the thing is that whenever i open VFB and try to click any of the buttons in it (Render Region, Track Cursor, Stamp, Color Correction...), the VFB with sketchup freezes and becomes unresponsive (everything else is ok, taskmanager does not report any unusual/intensive CPU/RAM activity), waiting for me to press ctrl+alt+del when it unfreezes.

the video of describing the problem is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JsCswp-UdI (sorry, the embed somehow didn't work for me )

hello everyone,

i'm sorry to invade this thread, but i just stumbled upon this site http://www.jamesshaw.co.nz/blog/?p=542 and it's essentially a walkthrough of the lighting setup for VRay (in combination with 3dsmax, but it's applicable to any VRay instance )

and i think it's a nice alternative to ChaosGroup's official tutorial on lighting, so that's why i thought it's appropriate to post it here.

i would say this is the limit of SketchUp, as it's only a 32bit application, so even with LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE it will not use more than 4GB of ram, and i would say that this is the issue.

hello,

is there any benchmark scene for sketchup's viewport speed? i've read somewhere that some benchmark can be done with some Ruby scripting and an animation playback, but unfortunately i lost track of the article, so i'm asking here, whether someone doesn't have something similar.

also, the most prominent aspect of viewport's speed is graphics card's OpenGL rendering speed, right? or does the cpu speed / ram amount have major impact on the performance?

thanks for any answer.

just for reference, how big are your... items? ('balls' would seem inappropriate ^^)

my sphere is 2,646m in diameter.

wow, thanks for this

another thing i discovered is that with 'use_3d_mapping' checked (ie. it's ON), the result is just like you showed us; however, if you uncheck it, you'll get a texture of the wood end. demonstrating on your material:

however, i couldn't get center_v get to change the scale on my textures. i would say that center_u and _v define the center position of the texture, so i don't think this would affect the size... more testing is needed though.

strange thing is that even when in the TexWood preview window something is happening, in the material preview and in the render not so many things change...

well at first i wanted to get the material 'correctly,' so i know how to simulate it later on with displacement/texture effects.

@fuzzion said:

PS. Why dont you start a new thread titled "Texture map help needed"

...because this is still relevant to the original post. he asks "Anyone ever attempted to render some BLINGCRETE?" and i don't suppose many people did, so when i continue posting here either i'll get it right or someone else comes along and helps with the material in question.

hi,

i guess the author of this thread does not come here very often

anyway, i've been trying to get around it, so i picked up on some reading about what it actually is and how it works...
(moar references here and here)

first info:

@unknownuser said:

BlingCrete is a form of retroreflectiveconcrete that reflects light rays falling it back in the direction of their source - it is an optical phenomenon that is used, for example, for road markings. Here, retroreflection arises by integrating micro-spheres of glass into the surface of the concrete

from stylepark.com

quick search on 'retroreflection' on wikipedia reveals some very interesting facts to me:

@unknownuser said:

A retroreflector (...) is a device or surface that reflects light back to its source

@unknownuser said:

Cat's eye

[...] This same effect can be optimally achieved with a single transparent sphere when the refractive index of the material is exactly two times the refractive index of the medium from which the radiation is incident. In that case, the sphere surface behaves as a concave spherical mirror with the required curvature for retroreflection. The refractive index need not be twice the ambient but can be anything exceeding 1.5 times as high; due to spherical aberration, there exists a radius from the centerline at which incident rays are focused at the center of the rear surface of the sphere.

source

so i decided to model the whole thing, and so far here's what i've come up with. according to wikipedia's description it should be correctly set up, but it still doesn't look like on the pictures; although i've only tried it only with sunlight and not artificial light sources... anyway, i feel like i'm one step closer (to the truth of this material's behavior).

my progress so far in attachments.

hi fuzzion,

that looks quite goood. however, i can't seem to find that material at the site you provided; any clue, where to search? or could you zip & upload it here?

well, so far i had no luck

however i like the reference images here and here and it's definitely a fun exercise to try to recreate it.

so far i've had some a little bit of progress, but nothing too fancy.