i assume you render with VRay - since Reflection channel didn't help, you could try Raw Reflection.

but maybe an easier way would be to remove the color from the sea and leave it white - that way the bumps would stay but you would have no problems with selection.

i just made a quick comparison between a procedural noise and a bitmap noise on a cube.

bitmap noise:

procedural noise:

0. this is no scientific comparison, it's just taking the cube and rendering it with a 400x400 BW bitmap and with TexNoise (Perlin, Size = 5). that said, i don't think that there will always be a difference this big between the rendertimes. also i suspect VRay of not adding the preprocessing time to the %rendertime% timestamp and shows only the final pass instead (correct me if i'm wrong).
1. i didn't expect a difference THIS big. 11s vs 20s is... well, impressive.
2. in the 'real' 3D work it will always matter which technique are you most familiar with to speed things up. additionally, there will always be a tradeoff between the preprocessing time of the procedural textures vs. rendering time of bitmaps.

i just think it's nice to have all this information at one place as a reference, so people don't have to wander around the internet or in their memories : )

i am sorry for the bad screenshot, i must have taken it while trying to figure the shadows out.

i would be very glad if the icon would solve the problem, but sadly, it doesn't. so thanks for the answers thus far and here's a new screenshot.

hello all,

on friday i finished the renderings of a family house. i've made more pictures, but they aren't published yet, so i would like to post only one picture now and ask around.

software used: SketchUp 8 and VRay 1.49.01 with Photoshop.
the modelling (and texturing) part took 16 hours, the rendering and post-processing took some 8-9 hours more (counting all of the 18 images made).

any comments and critiques regarding any part of the modelling/texturing/lighting/rendering/post-processing are most welcome.

i would especially like to ask, how would you suggest getting the light into the interiors? if there was more light inside, i guess that the windows' reflections wouldn't be so visible and it would look more real.

what i plan to learn/practice as a next step is rendering/workflow with a HDRi image (thus getting sky into the windows at rendering time) and inserting realistic grass with photoshop (through MaterialID channel).

so, thanks again for viewing; criticize away, please

hello all,

does anyone have any idea why the only shadows i can see are the ones on the ground and none on the faces? also, why could the "On Faces" option in Shadow Settings be greyed out?

thanks for any answers.

hello there,

when i save an image from VFB as a JPEG, compression artifacts are visible (whereas PNG gives clean surfaces).
this is a pity, as sometimes i could use the vray-generated sky color, but am bothered by the artifacts near the edges...

so, the question is: is there any way of regulating the vray's jpeg compression?

thanks for the shared material, i'll try it right away

meanwhile i found the post where i read about the double-glazing windows with vray.

hello all,

i am having some troubles with the setup of a window's glass material.

at first i only used the "clear_glass Archetectural.vismat" from the Vismat collection featured on the official page. however, this was the result:

see? too reflective. so i tried to lower the reflection amount from 1,0 to 0,2 and the result was already better; as seen on the following image, i also tried to see the differences between the Double Sided option checked on and off, and following someones tip i wanted to see if more realism can be achieved by adding a second window pane:

what do you think? could it pass as a decent glass material? i still don't like the white reflection (of the white sky) though, but setting the reflection value to 0,0 would probably be pointless...
what glass material do you use in your renders?

hello winGman,

create a material, open it in material editor:

assign the TexGrid texture to the Diffuse channel (or some other channel, depending on your desired usage) and try to play around with the UV repeat values to adjust its size:

after this, my render looks like this:

and that should be it

hello all,

do we have a similar feature to this, available to max users?

do i understand it correctly if it's a laptop?

because then it seems like some anti-throttling policy of the power management, and not an issue related to SU/VRay.

i read somewhere that the VRay plane cannot be textured (accepts only the color from SU's material).

the information about vray infinite plane [in rhino, but since no texture is showing up in my tests...]

andy, i've no idea what exactly you mean i'd be very eager to see your results.

no.

ha, i found a solution it's stefanq's trick from this thread - i used Override Material set to grey 128-128-128, calculated the Irradiance Map, saved it, loaded it, turned off the override and this is the result:

and just to be sure that was the solution, i re-rendered it with override turned off and with a calculation of a new Irradiance Map and it looks like this:

so happy

//although i'll now probably have to render every final render twice... o_o

it's SU8 with VRay 1.49.01 and the material is not #FFFFFF, but #E5E5E5

i tried it with VRay Sphere too (it's the big one), but the result is the same.

luckily, there aren't many 'perfect' spheres in design, but it's strange nevertheless. also the shading thing can be seen in sketchup directly, so i guess it's not really VRay's fault...

PS: could anyone give me an advice about why is there a stripe of light in the upper part of the inset rectangle (marked as '3' in my first post, third image) ?

hello all,

i read a thread where my attention was drawn to the possible difference between smooth surfaces and grouped VS ungrouped geometry.

so i set up a test scene - two spheres, one in a group, the other not in a group, a VRay infinite plane and a Material Override set to 229 229 229 RGB color.

settings [redirect to imgur.com]

the result? buggy

when the LC Subdiv amount was changed to a sufficiently high value (800 in this case), the image output was this:

"wow," i thought, "ungrouped geometry (although with edges hidden) renders sharp? i didn't notice that before."

so to test if it isn't just some sort of a bug, i immediately hit the render button again, and the result is this:

and every next render showed the same output as this second image.

so, to conclude - be aware of this thing, and a possible solution can be to start the render, interrupt it, and start it again. when you're changing the subdivision amount, that means you're probably at a stage of lighting the scene and searching for the right speed/quality ratio, so i guess it shouldn't hurt so much.

PS: hey, did you know that Override Material doesn't work on faces which have no material / sketchup's default ?
PPS: any ideas about how to get rid of the funny artifacts, marked in this last image?

thank you very much.

hello,

i hope that this forum is read by the developers too

i'm already used to the insane zooming system (which sends me to outer space when i'm editing a component in a big model and accidentally zoom in on the empty area).
what i would really appreciate is 'infinite' orbiting/panning - seen for example in Rhino, blender etc... basically the cursor is not limited by the window borders, but instead is relocated to the opposite side of the window and the orbiting/panning continues.

thanks for hearing my prayers out
~Adam

hello all,

i have two questions:

1 - in the computer centre in our university there is sketchup 8 installed, but i cannot load my custom plugins. is there any way to tell sketchup to load plugins from a different folder (eg. my USB stick) without needing administration rights?

2 - is there any way i could save the toolbars' position in sketchup window on my pc, and then load this UI setup in the school computer (preferably also avoiding the need of administration rights) ?

thanks very much for any answers.
~Adam

@unknownuser said:

You could use an AA filter -nothing wrong with that. However, turning it off and sharpening in Photoshop offers more flexibility.

now that's an interesting idea. thanks