Not sure this has been brought up in this thread or in another, but I am looking for a way to organize my materials within each project. It would be so great to be able to organize them into folders or some sort of system that lets me group items together... I have a ton of materials in the project i am currently working on and have been trying to keep track of them by renaming them etc... but it becomes very daunting to look through them all. For example I downloaded a sketchup 3d file of books for my bookshelves in a family room I am designing... obviously I don't want to re paint all the books with colors in my model... and when I add the component into my model it also brings in all the new generic colors that further clutter up my materials library. It would be so great to create a folder or file system to group all the colors that are in the books together so that I don't get them mixed up with my other materials... needless to say it is a hot mess in my materials library. Please tell me someone has created a cool plugin for this or has a solution for me : ) Or am I missing something very obvious???

@valerostudio said:

If you do a search in these forums, you will see the the Arrowway maps question has been discussed. Especially pertaining to the reflection / glossiness maps. Those freebies though are insanely low res and I wouldn't expect amazing results from them. I think you can buy some of the maps individually. The pay ones are very hi res and work well with VRay. You may have to downsize them though because they may be too large for SketchUp to handle. I think some of them get as large as like 12,000 pixels wide or something insane like that.

One more note. If you search for Jason Maranto, he is a Sketchucation user that has made SKM libraries of all of the Arroway free files. The libraries he made link direct to Maxwell, but you can still use the SKM libraries without Maxwell and the hi-res versions.

Thanks!

One thing i have been missing withe my version of vray was the materials that are supposed to ship with it... I did not realize that and have been trying to create or find materials elsewhere or create them from scratch, which has been time consuming. I realized that they had sent me an link to download the library when i first signed up but when I had clicked on it I got a forbidden error 404 so i did not download it at that time then I forgot all about it. I have sent a request to Vray for assistance downloading the vray library. I am assuming it is a pretty good place to start with some nice materials as well and all i have to do in import them!

@massimo said:

You have a diffuse map (d) a bump map (b) and a specular map (r). Just put the textures in the appropriate slots. I don't know Vray, sorry, but maybe the specular slot is called glossy or something?

Thanks! Should I save them as images first? If so what format? jpeg, png? Thanks for you help.

Now I have three Photoshop files... I was hoping the material was like a vismat file that I could upload directly into vray using the material upload command.. now I guess I will have to figure out what to do with the three Photoshop files. Looks like one is an image map and the other two are grey scale I guess one is a bump and the other displacement?

Should I save them as png or jpeg files then upload them into the appropriate layers in vray materials?

Thanks for your

@massimo said:

A rar file is just a kind of zipped file. Use for example this free application to unzip it.

Brilliant, I had tried downloading winzip rar... but could not get open the file open still. This 7-zip worked... After I installed it, I went to the rar file and then right clicked and there was an option to unzip it with 7.zip. Thanks!!!!

Hey all, I found a great website that has free versions of their materials. http://www.arroway-textures.com/catalog When I click on the link and download the free version it comes in as an rar. file? I was watching a tutorial and the guy was downloading from this site (the free part) and was using them in his sketchup model and vray. I have sketchup pro and Vray. Probably a dumb question and everyone here probably knows what an rar. file is but I have no idea? Any help here would be great. I would really like to be able to use these texture or materials as they look very nice.

Thanks for your help

@bunnyack said:

...and I didn't even know you can import a material outside of vray. I guess we've both learned something

Here is a pretty good site with free vray materials and models. http://www.flyingarchitecture.com/materials-leather/

Nice, I will check out Ferrari, I have been playing with soap skin and Artisan and love them both! Just trying to figure out what is best for what... but I guess it just takes time and experimentation.

@rich o brien said:

I recently got an Asus g75VW..... nice machine and great for CAD

Got the G75V, It is pretty great so far and super fast! Quite a beast though : ).

@bunnyack said:

I'm pretty sure that it renders in greyscale because it is, for some reason, only using the bumpmap. I have close to no experience with Vray, but doesn't it run on .vismat materials? the brown leather is a .mat file. I'm not sure about this, but when I try to import a material in vray, it only gives me the option to import .vismat files. I cannot even see the .mat file. Have you tried any other materials from that website?

You are correct, mat files do not seem to be supported, I found a vismat file and was able to install it!

Something that I picked up from your post that may have seemed obvious to everyone but me was the load material button inside of Vray, I did not realize that the file could be loaded that way!! So I was having two issues, first I was trying to work with the wrong file format and second, I did not realize that I could upload a material right into Vray, by right clicking on scene material and choosing "load material". Hopefully this thread will help another dummy like me figure out how to bring pre made Vray materials into their model through the Vray material editor.

Thanks so much!

One last note on this topic, I ended up taking my Mac back and getting an ASUS gaming laptop. I have not had this issue with my new computer... so i am assuming it was something to do with Mac... could have been the retina display or something... Anyway, just thought I would throw it out there as I am using Vray again on my new computer without any issues (knock on wood).

I know this is kind of silly and probably very obvious but I am having issues with a brown leather material that I downloaded from vray-materials.de . I downloaded the zip file then i moved it to my textures folder. I unzipped it but left the zip file there as well. So I have both the zip file and the unzipped file in that folder. Inside the unzipped folder there are two files (see attached image)

The first thing I tried was to import it as a texture, i have to change the settings to view all, then I only see the bumb file, when i place it on my sofa, it looks right but when I render it is only in grey. I get a similar result with the following steps...

Then I tried adding a new material, I was only given the option to import the texture or bump file as the other file that was in the unzip folder was not visible... when i brought that in as a new material it was gray scale... so i colored it myself with the color picker. But when I placed it on the sofa it is brown in the sketchup window like I would expect but renders grey scale (see attached image).

I am new to importing textures etc... so the answer could be very simple but I cant figure out what I am doing wrong,

Thanks for your help!

I will add Soap Skin and bubble to the list of must haves, FYI. I am sure you are all using it already but i just discovered it. I was wondering if Artisan was able to do the same thing? If so how?

Looks like it was probably just an irender issue, the latest version apparently has a bug that is not rendering the sun... so they sent me the link to the previous version for now... http://www.mediafire.com/file/bvnh6y91oqlk2nx/IRender_5_LL15nxt.zip I am seeing sun and shadows again. So that it good! Thanks for all the input... I think this has fixed the issue for now I will up date this post when they have it fixed.

Some screenshots...

@dave r said:

Do see shadows in the model space when Shadows is checked in the View menu? If not, perhaps you need to make adjustments to the Light and/or Dark sliders in the Shadows window. Go to Window>Shadows and look at the sliders. Maybe post a screen shot of it.

Yes the shadows are very clear in the model space.... and now they are rendering in Podium as they should but irender is stil rendering everything flat with no sun to speak of. It seems liek i was able to render ok a couple of times on my new windows 8 computer before this all started but maybe not? Maybe it is a windows 8 thing?

I am convinced that it is probably in my best interest to go ahead and re purchase it. I do use it for professional purposes. I am an interior designer and all of the pro features will be very helpful in my workflow! I am especially interested in learning how to work with dynamic components. The layout and Autocad integration are also pretty helpful and I am sure there are a ton of other benefits that I will enjoy as a pro user!

@chris fullmer said:

There is a toggle in SU to turn on or off shadows. Do you need to have them on in SU to have them show up in the renders?

I am pretty sure i have them on, under "view" I have shadows checked.... Is there another place i can turn on/off the shadows or sun settings in sketchup. Yes most of the renders do require shadows to be turned on I am pretty sure, and I do have them on (as noted above but maybe I am missing something???)

Thanks

@solo said:

Forgot about one tool I use a bit lately:

That is a pretty cool plugin. Like the fact that there is a physical camera that you can move around rather than having to adjust the "views" and I can see some other cool applications for it as well... wonder how this integrates with my rendering programs? will check into it!

I think I agree with both of you that Sketchup pro is probably an option I will want to go ahead and have right from the start... I just wanted to make sure there was not an alternative out there that was better or less expensive before I re purchased it.

Thanks so much for you help!

@solo said:

Your profile says you are using pro.

I had bought it but then I decided to return my Mac and go back to a windows computer. Instead of paying for the transfer fee that pro charges for changing platforms, I just returned it, as I was still within my 30 day window for returning. Now I am trying to decide of I want to re purchase it....

Any input would be much appreciated : )