I don't use v-ray but sketchup can use textured materials fine enough - it's just that the projection methods, specifically for cylindrical objects, are pretty haphazard last time i've checked...
https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model.html?id=79e72bdeeb60508976d9bf960443503e

Hell on Wheels is a TV show on the American Wild West.
Used Sketchup, mental ray renderer, refined in 3ds max, Photoshop, etc.

Original Photo:

Just a little trivia. If you look closely, you can spot Sketchup in the following video on Hell on Wheels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoLc1EZsRig

Dude. Awesome!

Pretty cool job. I don't get American steam engines though. It's as if the wheels and everything are floating in mid air and there's no frame It looks normal on cars but on trains it's plain weird for me

Cool. Your choice of color is excellent - yellow, grey and blue. Gotta zoom in to really admire the details

Thanks. I started this project (German BR52) after finding lots and lots of plans to help me out. I'm mostly working on railway stuff Texturing the loco as well.

Hi there. A few quick renders. Built in Sketchup and finalized / textured / rendered in 3DS Max. Admittedly Max has its high points, but for sheer speed you can't beat SU on some models!

I did this a long tima ago but finished it only recently. had a few issues at first. here's the alpha

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15%26amp;t=59443

Anything with pipes and bolted rivets catches my attention. looking great

I'm the one that usually makes steam locomotives.

German submachinegun here. Some surfaces were sub-divided.

Good points. I was sort of aiming for photorealism but the textures are really simple, and they don't reflect that

I uploaded a few wireframes. Some parts were built in quads and subdivided, like the wheels

Old truck from WW2, with an oil/wood burner installed.

I uploaded some wireframes as well, and a photo of what I used as reference

@loco said:

What renderer did you use?

Mental Ray

Thanks. When I said this was my first car, I meant that it was the first car I've built in SU. I don't really work with cars or trains IRL

Thanks John. I remember you also built a fantastic Model T (I think it was a Model T)

Hello. Here's an old soviet pick-up truck, in red. My first car. I don't know much about it, only that it came in several other variants (ambulance, fuel truck, ammo truck, etc).

Very surprised to find out that my model made it on the home page of cgtrader as of yesterday That's something I really wasn't expecting http://www.cgtrader.com/

Thanks for the feedback guys

Indeed some extremely cool ideas here

Hello. I made a couple of new models.

This cannon was more of a speed test for me (built it in a single weekend; 1 day for the geometry / 1 for the renders). The steam loco took several weeks (it's roughly ten times more complex than the cannon), but it came out nicely in the end. I designed the locomotive myself.

A couple of plugins were used, especially for chamfering edges (an excellent plugin, but I forgot its name).

Everything was built in sketchup of course (rendered with Mental Ray) , and I tried to make the geometry / renders as clean as I could. The hardest part for the cannon was building the chains actually... either way here are my models: