use the english version. you will never find any decent resource in italian such as tutorials etc...

that's really cool cotty, congrats!

@pbacot said:

As I look at the enclosure at the center in the picture, I can't figure out what's happening at the other side. It looks Escheresque.

ahaha true

did some minor changes to the previuous version. i think 95% of the difference depends on the fact it was taken away from Venus' atmosphere and placed into the actual granny's living room..

green velvet.vismat

@thomthom said:

Give me a nudge when you've done the model.

ok, i had a second run at it and now is almost fine for my purposes.. not perfect, but good, i also did a quick test in vray and it renders within a decent amount of ram.. i took some screenshot this time, i'll try to upload/arrange them as soon as possible..

@andybot said:

(you can save out a "visopt" file from your material editor.)
??? did you mean .vismat? or there is a way to save all materials at once?

@andybot said:

but if you want the texture to align correctly, you have to apply and position the texture directly on the surface of your model faces

that's true.
I would add that recently i noticed that when i apply different materials to different components instances of the same component from the component bunding box, material's bugs seem to appen more frequently..
maybe a coincidence.. but lately i try to avoid doing it when possible..

@jgb said:

Vertex Tools looks great but a bit overkill for me at this time.

i can't figure out in wich way a piece of software that effective and with that price is an overkill..
just the merge vertex feature is about 245234533613644734% worth the money.. and the problem of small vertex gap is gone forever..

@thomthom said:

Made a quick little test.

I turned the bump map intensity way down - using a Noise map with a very small size.
For reflection I used a very glossy fresnel map, with very low Perpendicular value (15).
Played a little with anistrophy - but didn't seem to do a whole lots.

Bumps are still too strong and the reflection is still not right. Needs something in the environment to reflect.

this is better than mine already, but i feel the gold paint still looks a bit metallic, however i 100% agree, enviroment is needed. I didn't use noise because i don't use it from ages and i don't remember how to control the dimension of the noise itself..
I think you are close there with the velvet.. mine looks more like a "loden.vismat"
i think when i rework this i can start a specific topic in vray section (or maybe wip?)

no there is no velvet vismat on their site.. usually i don't care about and rather prefer to start from scrach any new material and when i like it i save it so i'm building my own library. tried some material downloaded here and there, but most of the time i don't like them so much.
anyway i think the most tricky part about velvet is reflection. i found somewhere in yafaray site that velvet IOR should be set to 0.751002. so i will try this because i used a lot hgher ior and tried keeping the glossiness way low in both hilit and reflect. so i suspect the key maybe the filter? some pale green instead of default white??

according to the paint that's it, you can't see the wood. but anyway it should be different than pure gold metal. i tried a gold material with tex stucco in bump and reflect and the result is what you can see in the image, so it's quite crappy.

anyway i'll stop discuss this here cause some moderators around could ban me being completely off topic..

any good reference about green velvet and gold painted wood vismat?? never tried to fake that..

did you check "enable scene transition" in sketchup animation settings???

i will surely do it, i don't know exactly, but in the next days i think.. they should be part of an house rebuilt were they want to preserve the granny's sofa and harmachairs
the actual render should be done after christmas as far as iknow, but in the meanwhile i'm studing this monster furniture in the spare time.. you never know..

@thomthom said:

That's a nice sample model for me to use when testing Vertex Tools performance. Lots of vertices. And Soft-Selection rainbow looks pretty.

Mind if I show it off as a user example for Vertex Tools?

mind? what? i would be relly proud man!

in a pure grey hdr + infinte plane it renders quite fast in vray, few minutes with mediun settings at 2000x1666.. i will try it in a fully lihtened and reflective context to see what appens, i think.
feel free to use this model for anything you like. (maibe doing a rendering of your granny house.. duh)

edit - the model is slightly more than 4mb and i have never create an account or uploaded something in sketchup wharehouse, so you can download the model from here:
http://www.2shared.com/file/gZ9Jkupc/GRANNYS_SOFA.html

hope it work, let me know..

as far as i know the better method is using some curviloft/tig estrusion tools, depending on the shape, making sure to keep the original geometry instead of deleting it, so that if you need further tweaking/editing you can redraw the thing quite fast. i find in this case is much easier to redrav than rscale/fix/cleanup etc..

have you got a reference image for the backside?

just forgot to upload the file..

i have to model a couple terrific of old sofa/chairs and tried to figure out how to do this.. at the end i managed to do this without using neither vray displacement or artisan/blender wathever subdivision modeling.. just the combination of your brilliant mesh from eightmap plugin and of course VT.. faster and more effective than whatever i could dream of..
this is a fast draft anyway, i plan to try a better one, but so far way better and easier than i expected at first.
once again, thank you..

into the light cache set "passes" to the number of actual threads you have on your pc.
check your windows task manager to see if your pc supports 1, 2, 8, wathever.. threads