Posts made by ledisnomad

If the urban model is indeed just context, now that you've saved it out, could you explode everything? Not a very elegant solution, but if there are no components or groups, you can edit the materials of everything at once more freely. Then when you reinsert it in your model, it will be a component, no nested components.

amalskaer,
seeing as you haven't gotten any responses, I'll try to jump in even though I'm not an expert. First, just some clarification: are you talking about the generally blue hue of everything? That is caused by using the physical sky. If you don't already have it bookmarked, search for Vray for Sketchup manual. There is a very informative section about the physical sky and the settings. Another option would be to use an HDRI for lighting and reflections. Then you can choose a sky with a little more color in it.
The other question I have for you: what "color" is your walls? That is, are you using a true white (255)? If so, I'd recommend something more like 217 (85% gray) as your base color. Anything brighter than that and you risk getting strange effects. Between the physical sky and the white, that might give you a start.

Is that an image of a Vray render or straight from SU? I think I'm out of ideas...

That's a sizeable model, but a good machine. I'm going to go with a corrupt texture map... don't know if it is still a problem with Vray 1.49.01, but that was the most common cause of crashes for me on the previous version(s).

Easy test: in the Vray options, turn on the material override and render. If everything works, then it's most likely a texture map. If it renders, then try rendering a preview of one material at a time in the Vray Material Editor. The preview of the offending material often crashed my SU just like a full render did.

Sounds like you don't have enough memory to process all those polygons. Both the fur/grass and the trees probably have a lot of polygons, so together it may be too much. Can you look in the Model Info window and see how many faces are in the model? And what are the specs on your computer?

I got the four axon images from Bing Maps.

JGA, I was just looking for a way to do this last week! I have a site where Bing Maps has all four views in axon. I was hoping to use them with some kind of photogrammetry software to construct the context buildings. There are a number of options out there, but none seem to have any information about this particular application. I downloaded, but haven't installed, PhotoSculpt since it has a free trial and doesn't seem to require special camera calibration methods. Awhile back, I remember seeing software that was like photomatch, but for objects: pick points to on a few photos and tell the software which points match between photos. Then it builds the object and will apply the images as textures to each face. The more photos the more accurate. If you find something along these lines, let me know. I often encounter this problem on new projects before we get survey information.

fabrice de lyon,

I think you might be working too hard: In Render Options > Output, are you using the "Get view aspect" button? And in Render Options > Camera, are you using the Default Camera or the Physical Camera? From my experience, those are the only two places that can affect whether or not the SU and Vray output line up.

Not that anybody here doesn't know it, but I thought I'd reiterate... I changed offices and am now using Rhino, mostly. I love Rhino, but I'm trying to do some things I've never done before and there simply isn't any SketchUcation equivalent for Rhino. Need/want a script? Go look in five places, none of which is great. Have a question? You have to subscribe to a newsgroup! Or try one of three forums, none of which are half as active or helpful as SketchUcation.

So, I miss SketchUp and I especially miss the support that SketchUcation gives for it. Good job, SketchUcation team and community!

I'll try to explain clamping to get things started. Maybe others will chime in. Although since it rendered OK before, I don't know why it wouldn't be OK now.

In any image, there is a range of colors from black to white. Let's say the colors go from 0 to 255, right? Well, your camera may only be able to handle a range of 240 colors, so you could set the exposure to see 0-239 or 15-255. In the latter case, if there are areas of subtle shadows, you'd lose detail because the camera can't see it. In the former case, if there are bright areas of white or almost white, all that will get washed out.

In your case, this is what is happening. If you have the colors clamped, anything from 240-255 is shown as white. If you unclamp the colors, the Vray frame buffer represents 240-255 with solid colors from yellows to reds to black.

If you don't want any part of your image burned, then you need to adjust your exposure like you did until there is no difference between toggling the color clamping on/off. I'm not quite sure what you mean by:

@unknownuser said:

...but when I increase the exposure (at -0.27 its TOO dark), the SAME AREAS where the bad reflections appear, also appear when I turn the Clamped Colors layer/mask of the render window.
Can you post some images?

@unknownuser said:

Is there any max to the number of networked computers you can use?

The VfSU manual states "VRay can use up to ten computers with just one license." I have never tried more than a few, so I couldn't tell you if there is a limit other than this licensing limit.

I had an iPod Touch 2nd gen that I loved. I got it for many of the reasons people are talking about: all the features of a touch smartphone minus the phone, no data plan.

Well, a few months ago I decided to look into a real smartphone again. I'm on T-Mobile, which has a $10/month, 200MB data plan and they have the Samsung Vibrant (Galaxy S), an Android phone. It's awesome! All the freedom in the world: I plug it into ANY computer, PC or Apple, and it comes up as just another storage device. (There is a desktop app if you want to automate syncing and management.) All the apps on it take care of keeping things in order. Media player finds all the music, video player finds all the videos. I used to carry around a phone and my iPod Touch, and every now and then would have to look on both for a contact. Now I have only one device. It syncs beautifully with my Google account, so all my contacts and my calendar are all the same everywhere. Oh, did I mention that T-Mobile gave it to me for free?!

Just used distributed rendering for the first time last week. Enabled, added a computer by name from our office network, and went. I went from a measly 2 threads to 10 threads and cut my render time by a quarter.

@unknownuser said:

1. How does Vray handle animations within SU? Does it have it's own unique solution, does it use SU scene tabs, or do you need to first use a plugin to create scenes for each frame?

Vray uses SU scene tabs. You can set the FPS and scene transition times so that they work together to give you the animation speed/quality you want. I've used a few plugins to do smooth turntable-style or path animations, but when rendering, it's just a matter of the SU scene transition and Vray FPS settings.

@unknownuser said:

2. How do Vray materials work in SU? Do you select a SU material and apply Vray properties to it (high res maps, shader properties, etc.)?

Stinkie is right, Vray materials are synced with SU materials. If you change the color, transparency, or bitmap texture in SU, those things change in the Vray material as diffuse color, transparency, or bitmap in the diffuse channel respectively. All other properties are controlled in the Vray material editor.

@unknownuser said:

3. How interactive is it? I guess there's not a real-time preview solution for SU yet? So you just have to render a bunch of tests as you tweak materials and such?

Again, to elaborate on Stinkie's reply, there is no real-time preview, but if you have a few saved settings, it is very fast to test various changes. For example, many of my interiors, I have a draft setting for 640px wide that can take as little as 10-30 seconds (depending on the complexity of the scene, with 8 threads) so that I can evaluate illumination and colors. Then I have a draft setting for 1000px wide that takes 5-30 minutes so I can evaluate reflections, textures, and bump/displacement. And once you have that, yes, the region render helps to test changes in just certain areas.

Hope that helps!

Yup, that sounds about the same as me. I lose reflection layers, too. I seem to get the error rendering most often when I have Photoshop or another instance of SketchUp open.

Try this: http://www.vray.com/vray_for_sketchup/manual/transparency_mapping_in_vray_for_sketchup.shtml

It's not exactly what you need, but it takes you through the steps.

Not to state the obvious, but have you considered upgrading to the latest VRay version? I've never seen that problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if the newest version cleared it up without figuring out the root cause.

So far, the jQuery Reel Plugin is the winner, IMO. Al, your Javascript-only implementation is nice, too, but doesn't have the polish yet. I'm going to do some render tests soon and see how it works.

If you have Photoshop, it has an automated stitch function that works very well. File > Automate > Photomerge. I've used it on high res aerials from Google Earth Pro and it works very well. Depending on how many you have, 250MB per might be too much for even Photoshop. However, you could make a droplet (File > Automate > Create Droplet) to resize them all beforehand. If you gave me the image start and finish image size/resolution you want, I could create the droplet for you.

Same as rspierenburg wrote, but more specific: Create a copy of the texture map you have. It looks like it is white text on a black background, right? Then edit the image so that it is gray text on a black background. Use this copy as the transparency map. The black background will be completely transparent like you have now and whatever shade of gray you use will determine how transparent the text is.