I am trying to get AR-Media plugin to work displaying a model on an iphone with iOS 8 and it seems that these guys havent updated this software in quite some time. Any experiences?

You need to model it the way it would be in real life. Glass door, place an omni light inside the room that is to 'glow'.

Provided that you still have the scene in SketchUp, just export the same view using the 3000 height dimension and align it in PS. It should be the same view vertically and the horizontal difference will overlap.

Do not use an HDRI in your GI or BG. In 2.0 you have to create a dome light. This will fix the problem.

My Wish List
Parsing times to rival VR4Max
Fur / Grass
VRayEdgesTex (SU would benefit from this greatly) http://help.chaosgroup.com/vray/help/150SP1/vrayedgestex_params.htm
VRayXtraTex Pass (for an easy AO pass)
V-Ray Light material

Also check to see Use Color Texture as Transparency is checked off for that material. If this is on, then it will not recognize the transparency from SU.

Newbie 101 - 1) Just stay clear of displacement until you are comfortable with VR, use bumps for now. 2) If you download vrmats from places other than the Chaos site, I would be very careful as these may have displacement, odd settings, high subdiv values that will slow you renders down, etc. Learn to make VR materials from scratch to fully understand what does what. Chaos has some great tuts on YouTube.

Would love faster parsing times on large scenes. Other than that, I am a very happy customer.

Yes. Confirmed. Adding DR nodes after an animation has started, will include those nodes.

My guess is that this only happens when using batch render and not rendering an animation. I can test it for ya.

I assume this would all be done with saturated emissive materials, but anyone have any other tricks to achieve these effects?

Bertrand Benoit (as far as I am concerned, the best of the best) posted this today. I think it hits on some of the topics of why these renders look so much better.

Page not found

(bertrand-benoit.com)

A crappy render is going to be the result of a crappy model and (no offense to my SketchUp peeps) most SketchUp models are built by folks who really don't detail their models. Look at that Evermotion stuff. every corner is chamfered, floors are modeling with Floor Generator Script, etc. Lots of detail = really good renders. The stuff on Evermotion is the best of the best, regardless of the program used. These are the masters of their craft in both model, texture. lighting, and post. Most choose to use Max because of the reasons listed above and yes, 50% of that quality is achieved within post production.

tisk tisk tisk. I'd rather pay for 2.0 in 2015 than use bootleg 1.49.02. God 1.49 version was the pits...

Are you using VRay lights in those recessed cans? It's ok to use an emissive material for the light effect, but you still have to place a light in the component. I would use an IES file. Your lighting is too flat in this scene. Try one of the preset stainless materials on the Chaos site as a starter.

If you go with Andy's method, attached is a stainless material map.

If you are using single plane glass, just make a material that has just a reflection layer and not refraction layer. I think what you read meant to set the refraction IOR to 1.0, which is basically the same has not having one at all. In the reflection layer, I use Fresnel IOR set to 1.4 and edit the Fresnel to not use pure and white black. Adjust them just a little up and down.

Just because you can import a PSD into SU doesnt mean you should. I have had awful results with this.

What if you rename it through SketchUp Material Editor and not VR?
I use SU2014, latest SP, Windows 7 64 and do not seem to have this issue.

It depends on how you are setting up your lighting. If you use HDRI lighting, you should use the dome light. The Default Lights check box no longer makes the SU shadows show anymore. That's an old hack from 1.49

I wouldn't hold out for a very early release of 3.0. As a beta tester I can tell you a private beta has not even been discussed yet. 3.0 is on the horizon, but I think it will be a longer timeline than that.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I just wanted to dispel any rumors and not get too many people psyched that 3.0 will be around in March or something.