@unknownuser said:

emitter not. with "blackbody emission" I don't get the submenu

You should be able to to open the submenu by clicking the chevron or text (1). You can expand everything by clicking the plus button (2):

@unknownuser said:

also hidden layers are rendered. how can I avoid this?

Hidden objects / tags / layers isn't supported yet in the alpha version. It will be there for the 1.0 version.

Cheers,
Thomas

Wow, that's stunning, and I'm very pleased to see those results coming out of Rayscaper. This makes for a great demo scene to share with Rayscaper users

Best wishes for 2024!

@unknownuser said:

Maybe one of these days I can try RayScaper with SU 2020.

Definitely not forgotten, it's on the list of things to do.

Cheers,
Thomas

Very nice render! I'm going to collect some renders next week for my website (http://www.rayscaper.com). Are you okay if I share it, of course, with proper credit?

Regards,
Thomas

@majid said:

It works charmingly!

It's great to see a talented artist like you taking an interest in Rayscaper! I saw you sent me some feedback, so I will go and digest that.

Cheers,
Thomas

That's some sad news to start the new year...

This one hits home very hard because I'm also trying to enter the rendering market with my product. An ecosystem with a couple of big players is never a good state. I wonder why it was decided to sunset it altogether.

I wish the developers all the best in their future endeavors.

Cheers,
Thomas

Very well done! What render engine did you use?

Cheers,
Thomas

Thanks for the background! How often does it snow in Perth?

Cheers,
Thomas

Wow, stunning!

@pc10pc said:

Hi,
I'm on SU 21.1.332 and having the same issues with toolbar not showing up.

Hi,

Could you check if you can get it via these instructions? If that doesn’t help, send me a private message.

Cheers,
Thomas

Nice render! Did you do the snowflakes in post?

Cheers,
Thomas

@solo said:

Regarding emissive materials, I choose diffuse emission but there is no way to link my material/image to the emission, is this a feature still in the works?

An example is a TV screen.

Hi,

Right now, the diffuse emission only accepts a single color. Putting a texture there is still in the works but will be available in one of the next updates.

Cheers,
Thomas

@solo said:

Okay,

I'll be off for the year next week, let's play with this

I downloaded this a month ago, not touched it, is there a newer version>

The latest build is here: https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=76483 - The SketchUcation extension store will always have the latest test build.

I will make a release post here on the forum when a new build is available.

I appreciate your time and feedback! Feel free to reach out when you have questions.

Cheers,
Thomas

Wow, seeing these incredible renders coming out of Rayscaper is great! This is one of the first production renders created with Rayscaper.

Rayscaper couldn't have come so far already, thanks to Rich's continuous support, feedback, and patience. Rich has been very gracious with his time in giving valuable feedback and is very instrumental in shaping Rayscaper. A lot of the current and future improvements have his hand in it.

I'm not much of an artist, but I will show mine first These scenes are not mine but adapted from pbrt and rendered with Rayscaper. If you are test-driving Rayscaper, I would love to see your stuff, even if it's just a work-in-progress. We are all friends here!

SteamPunk Chopper (model: https://www.blendswap.com/blend/8850), resolution: 1200x800, global illumination, 16 seconds.

BMW M6 (model: https://www.blendswap.com/blend/2164), resolution 1000x714, global illumination, 4 seconds.

Stay tuned! There's a lot of good stuff coming.

Cheers,
Thomas

@ntxdave said:

Thanks for sharing the release plans.

Just hoping I will be able to use with SU 2020 and that it will be something I can afford.

Yes, I'm looking into supporting SU2020. It will be part of one of the upcoming releases.

And yes, I plan to offer great software that everyone can afford. Of course with a discount for premium members.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hey folks,

You can get the test build for Rayscaper, Windows, version 0.7.3 Alpha here.

Keep in mind this is alpha software.. Have a look here to see what that means.

Changes since the last build:

• Fix the propagation of the “smooth normals” option to Rayscaper. Changing this property would not update Rayscaper before this change.

• Add the options to manipulate the normal map:

• Flip the red channel.

  • Flip the green channel.
  • Swap the red and green channels.

• Add the option to specify the color space of an image texture (either normal RGB or float textures). This is very important to obtain correct render results when using LDR images (jpg / png / etc).

• Add the capability to export the model and all the assets used by Rayscaper to an archive (zip file).

• Update the styling of the thumbnails in the assert browser.

• Add increment/decrement buttons to modify numeric values. Pushing the buttons will increment/decrement by the step size. Holding the shift key while pushing the buttons will increment/decrement by 10x the step size.

• Don’t use sliders for configuration values that have a high range (for example, scale/translation/shear). It’s impossible to control such a large range with a slider precisely.

• Add the “Highlight Clamp” option, which clamps bright incoming light to reduce bright pixels (fireflies).

• Reduce the logging in Rayscaper. This improves the performance of SketchUp when running Rayscaper.

• Fix the saving of the camera settings, image resolution, and tone mapping settings.

• Make the material and light lists resizable in the material and light tabs of the scene editor.

• Fix the saving of light data.

• Support emission for high-polygon geometry.

• Fix the high power values required to light up a scene with sphere lights or spotlights. Now, the user can punch in more realistic power values for the scene.

• Add a "fake emission" capability to emitters. With fake emission, the geometry the material is applied to will look like it is emitting light, but it won't actually act like a light source in
  the scene. This can reduce the render times.

• Fix the approximate global illumination kernel's washed*out ambient occlusion fake GI mode.

• Add a new environment fake GI mode to the approximate global illumination kernel. This mode uses the environment light to fake indirect light.

• Fix the albedo render pass.

• Improve the high-quality denoiser algorithm.

• Fix the time value in the render status bar. The timer would display wrong values when the render took longer than 1 hour.

• Sort the materials/lights alphabetically in the scene editor.

Quick Tips

• If this is your first time installing Rayscaper, have a look at our installation instructions.
• If you installed Rayscaper before, have a look at our upgrade guide.
• We also have a quick start guide with a free demo scene.
• The documentation is here. Documentation is a work in progress.

When you get stuck, have questions, or want to say hi, create a post in this forum (Extensions & Applications Discussions) or send me a private message. We have a documentation section on finding help..

Happy Rendering!
Thomas

Beautiful chair, and a very nice render!

Cheers,
Thomas

Hey Miss Lazy,

First of all, it looks like you don't have the SCFLicense installed. This is part of the SketchUcation store extension and is a prerequisite to run Rayscaper. You can pick up the extension here: https://sketchucation.com/plugin/696-sketchucationtools

Can you let me know if that helped?

Cheers,
Thomas

@solo said:

Is there a shadow catcher material?

Not yet, but it's planned, should be there in a couple of weeks.

Here's the planned road map for 1.0: https://rayscaper.com/docs/roadmap/

Cheers,
Thomas

@ntxdave said:

Thanks for the feedback. I thought I had done something wrong. 2020 is the latest version I have and Rich's model was 2020 so I expected everything to go smoothly.

BTW: When I comes time to document the plugin, I would suggest you look at Skatter Help. They have a great (IMO) site for learning how to used the features of their plugin.

Edit I would also suggest that you check back to 2017. I see a number of users on this forum that are still using 2017. I would also suggest you post an interior and an exterior render.

Hey Dave,

I figured out that supporting SU2020 requires another Rayscaper build (because it requires re-compilation against a different Ruby version). This is a bit more work, can you try it out with SU2021 or higher?

Thanks for the pointer to the Skatter docs, that's indeed great documentation. As you already noticed, I started creating my own documentation here: https://rayscaper.com/docs/

Yeah, I should post more renders, the problem is that I am not an artist/creator. So my strategy is to keep fixing bugs and making improvements until someone comes along and finds it good enough to create a good render

Regards,
Thomas