To be honest I think that looks better than most non-post grass. There is a tutorial floating around these forums (check tutorial section) on how to place grass using photoshop as I think that would be your best bet for realism.

The chair itself has a very dark material which means the only way to show detail in it would be with proper lighting. In a real world example, if it was that sunny outside and you were looking at a black (charcoal) chair in such harsh, bright sunlight you probably wouldn't notice any detail in it either.

My suggestion would be to play with either the material of the chair (lighter color perhaps), or turn off the sun and use Vray lights to achieve the perfect amount of lighting to bring out the details in the chair material.

Rob

And the red just don't believe in punctuation? lol.

And to think, modelling these lights is probably 1/1000th as hard as making them in real life. Very impressive.

I don't believe render times would be affected. You would simply be able to move around your model in Sketchup easier as it doesn't have to redraw all the faces each time.

Another possible solution would be to create two renderings. One with just the shadows including the "Ghost" object (VFB Channel Shadow) and then one without shadows showing just the visible objects rendered. The combine them in Post.

Make a texture using a 100% transparent PNG and map that to your object. Shadows will still be affected but you will be able to see through it. I use it for roofs in top-down views to show proper lighting effect of the sun through windows.

Rob

I've heard of this patch before, I thought it only allowed you to use the full 4Gb rather than ~3Gb as usual.

Can you post an example of your results thus far and perhaps what you are trying to acheive?

Sorry I misread the original post. This will allow you to modify a texture. There should be a button that says something to the effect of "Open or Create a Collection." Or you can import an image as a texture.

I believe the material has to be in use already before you can edit it. Same for SU for PC.
Try adding the material to a face first, and then edit it.

Rob

You can try to explode the images once they are placed before rendering.

Cool...you learn something new everyday. The only reason I knew about keeping the cork wet is from my parents, not much of a wine drinker myself.

Rob

If that is the area you are looking to have grass an option would be to look at the Sketchup Fur Plugin. It creates actual low-poly grass that looks a lot better than a displaced texture IMO. Just a thought.

Rob

And Vray will continue to have memory issues until such time as a) Trimble releases a 64bit version of Sketchup or b) Chaos releases an external rendering program that can take full advantage of 64bit systems.

The memory issue is not that of Vray, but rather of Sketchup. This is why, for larger models, its best to render directly to a file (.exr)

But I do agree that beyond that there are still a number of issues that Chaos needs to correct on their end as well.

Rob

I suppose it all depends on what you need with an invisible plane. You can add a 100% transparent material to it and it won't show up in your render. If you want it to cast a shadow make a material with a fully transparent PNG.

Rob

I remember seeing a webpage explaining how to get this information. I did find this however, which might be a starting point.

Flickr

Flickr (www.flickr.com)

Rob

Very nicely done. To be picky though, the top wine bottles should be pointed down, don't want the cork to dry out. I noticed it was the same way on the manufacturers site..tsk tsk. Lol.

Rob

A couple of things you could try would be to try rendering it with override materials, this would let you know if one of you materials is causing the issue. The other potential problem is that its running out of memory in which case you would have to render to a file instead (.exr) and then adjust it with Photoshop or something similar.

Sketchup won't seem to let me change the aspect ratio for some reason. I can either change the Width or Height but not both or I can use the screen resolution which didn't work either.