hello all,

i just needed to create a displacement map from geometry for later use. luckily, i happened to find this tutorial pdf from nomeradona (sorry, i googled straight the pdf, no tutorial page in between) and created a scene which could be reused with other geometry - and i thought i would share.

for this scene to work straight away you'll unfortunately need VRay.

however, it is definitely usable in other renderers too - two important information to know is that the red base plane is at Z = 0, and therefore the camera's distance equals the Eye Height (obtainable through the standard SU icon ). the other information is that this scene is set up to maximum geometry's height of 10cm (25.4 inches). these two values should set you up. oh and be sure to check your output aspect ratio and/or resolution.

of course, some post-processing of the resulting render is needed; but i think it's easier to post-process than to create from scratch

i'm attaching the scene file, i hope you'll like this addition.

PS: and of course, any additions/suggestions are most welcome, following the spirit of open-source

dispmapcreator.skp

well, i just gave it a try, but's doing the exact opposite i want it to

i attach the render, separate vismat file, and the whole scene, if anyone wants to try to tweak my work, feel free.
note: i've used TexGrid instead of the 'proper' honeycomb texture that is on the original image, thinking that i can switch all TexGrid instances for textures once i got the effect right.

blingcrete-tests.skp

default_white.vismat

the floor's bumpmap is too large, i would scale it down.

thank you, i enjoyed this although i don't know all the characters )

did i just open an animal thread on a forum?

as has been said in one comment under a video on youtube, i will have to "go throw rocks outside for 20 minutes so i can feel like a man again"

...we have a dog too, a brown labrador, now living his second year (i think he'll be 2 in autumn), but i have no photos with me right now

the thing is, that VRay for Sketchup does not support camera shifting.

what i do to come around this limitation:

• pick my view
• set Two Point Perspective view in SU's camera
• change the camera back to 3point Perspective (using the toolbar again)
• either pan manually upwards,
• or use a combination of panning and slight tilting of the view (so that the verticals are almost straight and the horizon is almost at the height i want it to be)

i'm glad that your problems got resolved, and i need to say that is one fine looking water!

since you already shared the material, would you be so kind and post the displacement texture as well?

hi and thanks for the comments,

somehow i had a lot of school to do and didn't get to update this thread; now i had the time.

i have re-rendered the image and replaced the grass and adjusted the colors in post production, i think it's a bit more realistic now.

i now know that the bricks are not like in real life and that more precise texturing would be needed, but somehow i got stuck with finding a good capping solution (and texture) for the fence so i didn't continue.

and i think that people are essential for architectural visualisation, as they provide a sense of scale, so the person stays. although i may have used a more 'real-person-like' figure, this one seems calm enough to believe her that she's in her garden.

anyway, here's the new version; i hope it was changed for the better

so it's one practical, everyday use of the Rayleigh Criterion. thanks for calculating this for us

@thomthom said:

Yes, why not? Updates aren't there to annoy you - they include fixes and improvements. It's always best to ensure you are up to date before debugging a problem with a software.

while i usually enjoy watching the progressbar of an update taking place (srsly, i do), i had had some issues when i was updating to the latest vray and hence have decided that if it works, i'm not going to mess with it until some major new release (like SU 9) comes along. but now i've updated and there were no problems so far, yay

well, i'm asking because i would like to use the shadows (in their vector form) in post-processing in Illustrator/Inkscape... but so far it seems that hi-res png export with manual tracing is my best option. thanks guys.

hello,

i actually wanted to ask something. is there any way of exporting (rendering) the shadows/shadow lines/areas into a PDF? is there any (ideally free) plugin for this? why doesn't sketchup do this automatically?

thanks for any answer,
~eidam

i think that windows as dynamic components would be a good solution. however, i never got to create any dynamic component in sketchup and my workflow is similar to yours, so i'm in fact commenting just to see the replies from others.

@thomthom said:

Ah, yes! SU8 M1 added LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE support - so if you are under 64bit Windows you can address up to 4GB of memory. You're absolutely right.

WHY DON'T I EVER UPDATE

sorry for the rude off-topic interruption

that's a really odd problem. i would try simply reinstalling the VfSU (so that the paths and dlls and links etc. are written anew), other than that i have no idea

i guess i must have tried it last time with 1.48 and forgot about it in the new version.
i had no success with clicking around in 1.49 either.

looks nice so the grass is only a rectangle with an alpha texture and copied all over the place?

examples: http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/examples_vrayphysicalcamera.htm

short tutorial: http://www.mintviz.com/tutorials/white-balance-setup-with-with-v-ray-physical-camera-and-3ds-max/, it is for 3DSMax but i think it's applicable to VfSU, too.

hello everyone,

i' back at the dormitory, so now i have both my computers available. i wanted to make some new renders of a family house project on the laptop (where previously the renders were done under 20 minutes), but it seemed like it needs too much time. so i say - hmm, that's weird, i wonder how does it render on the bigger one (better CPU, faster RAM, 64bit machine). identical settings, same scene, textures local in regard to the machines.

of course, it rendered faster (5 minutes, actually; compared to 20 minutes on laptop this is a dramatic difference, but off topic).

one thing surprised me very much - the laptop got 'stuck' (ie. got extremely slow - this didn't happen before) at the Light Cache calculating phase and SU's RAM usage went according to window's task manager up to 1.3GB. at the same stage, the RAM usage at the bigger PC was not more than 600MB for SketchUp's process.

...wtf? do you think that this is an OS difference in memory management? or just a weird VRay bug? what could the cause be?

EDIT: ok, so i found the hog - in the meantime i added a new material with displacement, and that's causing the huge slowdown on the laptop. without the displacement the laptop renders fast too. however, with displacement turned on the scene renders fine at the big PC; so i'll just probably try to stay away from the displacement.

i'm especially surprised by the looks of the rounded edges... but i guess that's a SketchUp thing, rather than VRay's, right?