Hi, I am trying to complete an external street view render. I have a few questions:

1. How can I increase the speed of the render without effecting the quality?
2. What are the best render settings for external renders?
3. How can I get a sky in the background?
4. Why are my shadows not showing?

I have turned on shadows with the skecthup settings. I have also removed the items which are not viable in the scene to see if this will increase the render speed.

Thank you in advance.

I used sketch up with vray a few years ago, and haven't has the need to use it since until now. I am currently running sketch up make 2016 and have purchase vray 3.4.

I am quite confident with using sketch up, but I am unsure of how to use the vray materials. From memory there use to be a vray materials library with glass, grass, metal, wood presets which worked better within the model when it was rendered. However the version of vray I am using does not seem to have a materials library?

On the chaos group webpage it says there are 520 materials with the version I have, but how can I use these within sketchup?
Or do these have to be downloaded from an independent website?

Thanks in advance.