i can't test the material because i don't have vray on sketchup, but i gave a quick look at the model..

as a good modeling practice, i STRONGLY reccommend to drop all of you geometry to layer 0 (ALWAYS)

in your model the displaced geometry is assigned to different layes (some geometry is on layer 0, other is on terrain layer) use group and soubgroups (or components) to manage layers and leave edges and faces assigned to layer 0..
not sure this is causing this specific problem (can't test) but it may cause all sort of problems and odd bugs within sketchup.

another thing you can try, is to smooth the geometry (the mesh is actually hard edged) and see if it helps.

i think the main problem however, is the missing of a proper uv-map (causing discontinuity in texture, see screenshot of your model below) and the fact that the material is not applyed to the back face too..

i really suggest to fix both problems at once using the tru paint plugin (apply "natural" mapping with the "front&back" opttion ticked). that should clean your displacement.

però non ho capito chi te la fa fare a usare il displacement, usa i proxy di vray con qualche plugin come ad esempio skatter ($$) o raytracer (free) o component spray (free) per spargere l'erba e le piante in vario modo.. viene meglio, più veloce e consumi tonnellate di RAM di meno

edit - missing screenshot

@tomaccess0 said:

You're right, I googled for pretty long, and I found someone saying that bumping without difusers will have problems on sketchup, is that true?

i think your problem is not the fact itself that you are missing a texture in the diffuse..
the real problem is the missing UV mapping..

i think you can also apply the texture in the diffuse to uv-map it and then remove it.. not sure how new vray sketchup works, but that's how vray for max works..

if that's not working in sketchup, i think you can still apply the bump texture to a second diffuse layer and assign transparency using vray color (set to black) as opacity map to that layer.
with this trick you should be able to see the diffuse texture in sketchup viewport, but vray will not render that..

i see those splotches in the floor and maybe a bit in the dark panels in the middle too.. try to render a separate raw gi pass, to better see how gi is working overall..

assuming that everything else is fine in your irradiance map AND light cache setup.. i would try to reduce the color treshold value and see if that help..

@rspierenburg said:

I believe this is what he meant.

yes of course, that's the "1 click" solution for his problem.
as far i can tell, the problem is quite simple:

@john2 said:

I want to get clear white colours in my renders for clay models. Unfortunately, vray is giving blue colour

plus i assume he said that:

@john2 said:

I don’t want to go for a post processing option. I want to resolve this issue within sketchup itself to save time and energy.

and.. as box properly said, that bluish tint in the global illumination is 100% coming from the vray sky system, so the quick and dirty way (sticking with vray sun and no post work) to get monocrome clay models, is to kill whatsoever tint from saturation value in the gi.

sorry, but i really didn't believe a screenshot was needed..
that's the one and only satuaration control in the gi rollout and it looks quite self-explanatory

ok, then i suppose it's adding triangles to fill the gap and probably assignin them the default material, try to assign the grass material also to the group itself and not only to the mesh.
as a side note, i would not suggest to use displacement at all for such a large area..

looks like you are using displacement without the "keep continuity" option (or whatever that's called in sketchup vray i don't remember) turned off, is that?!?

sketchUV "path select tool" rules!

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=44501

not 100% sure about the exagon being the best starting shape, depending on what i have to do, in most cases, i start from 4,8,12,16 segments.. anything you can split by 4.. there are some cases in wich i use 6, that's fine, but i would not say that's always"the golden rule".. it tends to generate asymmetrical topology distribution/flow/cap, sometimes it's what i need, sometime it's not..

looking at your grid example, in that case exagon is the best way to go, bacause you need to tile your rows "alternate" but in the case of a "stack bond style" tiling, that same base topology could be quite problematic..

so definetly, it depends on the shape/topology you are tryng to achieve.

@thomthom said:

whenever I start working on it I end up writing an extension

lol

@skeerc said:

I've already created a detailed outline of the island using Google Earth in SKP. The Island is mostly quite rugged terrain overall. I'm fairly new to SubD/Vertex Tools & see the advantage of using the Quad mesh. Do you think SubD/Vertex Tools would work for this approach? I was going to break the Island up into large blocks (sections) to work on at first with maybe a grid format of 5000mm? to get started & then infill areas as required. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Steve

Sorry if i answer late (too late i suppose) i missed this post at all.
This can actually work. i'm pretty sure because i did a similar project and achieved a good result with the very same process you've described..
you can convert the low poly google earth mesh to quads, then detach some plate in the areas were you need more detail and use a mix of sub-d and vertex tools to add geometry and deform it as required..
you will get an heavy, but still workable model, if you manage it properly..

@hornoxx said:

I am also impressed, how well such a very very small texture can work - Which again is effective

the fun fact is that the texture popped out from an architect's concept model for a bar/cafe, wich was filled with some wharehouse "gems" like this original croissant below..
i ended up doing a massive cleanup of all this terrible stuff (all of this is intended for mid-distance render btw, not suitable for closeup HIMO) and as i noticed the low res (but nice) texture and it was like "ok, challenge accepted"

BTW that 313 is super!!

@hornoxx said:

:thumb:
hmmmm !!!! these look so delicious - and what a great model idea

@nlipovac said:

Wow, how simple and yet it is complex idea.

thank you guys
actually is a useful trick that i use often, in particoular for food.. tracing a simple shape with a very "minimal" topology on the very same image i want to planar map to it.. then i do a first iteration, texture it with tru paint (and some manual tweaking) and collapse to simple mesh.. just to add a few vertices to work with VT.. i find that in this way the texture is more easily preserved from distortion.. after that i tweak it another little bit, i run subD for a couple of final iterations..
i have to find a couple of italian salami & prosciutti i did with the same tecnique some time ago..
i got the collapsed meshes, but i'm not managing to find the proxies animore

just a quick subdivided croissant..

croissant sub-d.skp

as far as i can tell, just try make them components and you should get rid of this problem. they also should be imported in autoBad as blocks..

i shared this mini-tutorial in the sub-d section, but i would like to share the link here to, because i also used flowify in the modeling process of this lamp..

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=397%26amp;t=66269

@john2 said:

@panixia said:

you may also want to quickly turn down saturation in your gi rollout

How and where? Please post screenshot.

i think i fixed both

Today i modeled this nice lamp shell from this photo. I would like to share here a very bulk and quick tutorial on the workflow i followed using mainly QFT + SUBd + VT + Flowify.

I started from a rough trace of half of the ornament profile from the reference photo using a mix of regular SU arc/line + fredo's polyline segmentor + quadfacetools pencil + vertex tools extrude.

Then i traced a proper volume for the shape, starting from and 8-side circle extruded and manipulated furthermore using vertex tools gizmo and then subdivided at a couple of iterations of sub-d

I used unsmooth quads, then selected half of the shape and used "grow selection" in quadface tools to include the loops higlighted in the screenshoot below (this will help flowify to better fit the shape) inverted the selection and deleted all the unnecessary geometry..

Then i used quadfacetool unwrap to unwrap it to the flat grid and arranged the base for flowify as you can see below

Then i went back to the traced profile mirroring the geometry like this

at this stage i grabbed a few vertices from the bottom end to stretch them using vertex tools with soft selection.. in this way i compensate (just eyeballing) the fact that i traced the distorted bottom part from a flat image and now i'm going to distort it again, so i sort of "reverse enginereed" that.. After that i give it a first single iteration of sub-d

Then i ran flowify without cut to get something like this

Finally i did a mirror/copy of this shape and ran sub-d once more for the final smooth.

That's it. I hope you enjoy.

@collage architecture said:

Is there something between instance and faces size ?

yes there is, and it's the "scale definition" property..
and i've found that may cause trouble for sub-d (and other tools/plugins too)

you should have that same texture in the diffuse, then you can see it in sketchup viewport so you can uv-map it with tru-paint, sketchUV or something then turn off texture in the vray diffuse.. it should work.. (that's basically how it works in 3dsmax vray.. if i'm not wrong there is some trick to do the same in vray4SU, like adding the texture to a second diffuse layer and then assignign transparency to it or something like that)