Guess we need to see a screenshot to really see whats going on.
Sounds like they just want to see more of the BG reflected in their glass. Most of us would achieve this by upping the IOR. My suggestion as a cheat is to not use Fresnel at all (I know, blasphemy).
3.0 seems like a lot. Maybe 1.8 when I am really faking it, but I would never (or need to) use 3 for Fresnel.
Are you using thick glass with refraction? Front face check? The angle are you viewing the glass at will effect how the reflection looks - that's what Fresnel is.
If you must fake a reflection, just take Fresnel map off the reflection slot and add a very dark gray, almost black color to your reflection slot. The closer to white - the more reflection.
My understanding is that V-Ray Express is simply a material and component library added to your standard SU libraries.
What's up with Thea users in the V-Ray forums trying to make converts of us?
There's absolutely no reason VR can't make a render using RT (in 2 min with a $1,000 graphics card) of a 30MB file with proxies.
Make sure you have the latest SP2.
Check your back faces - its good modeling practice
I would group some elements in your model - There's a lot of loose geometry, again its good modeling practice to use groups and layers.
Make all landscape into proxies
Render to EXR or VRIMG using Preview
Use the 64 bit workflow
If you have other machines on your network, setup DR
It's nice and the price is nice for what you get. My biggest concern is the memory limit. My SketchUp files can get to be monsters at 100+MB and when I tried to do a quick interactive lighting study, it crashed the memory load of SU. Any plans for a 64 bit standalone version?
LightUp - Thoughts & Experiences? Obviously, not mind blowing GI rendering, but $189 and the Player is the most interesting thing to me as clients sometime ask for these interactive files.
I played with the demo and tried it on one of my larger files and it crashed SU due to running out of memory.
You can use lens correction in Photoshop or this software
Currently, VR4SU doesn't support 2pt camera matching exactly as you see it in SU.
I'll take a stab at this by saying that if you have a specific image and you to be able to move and scale it correctly, I would just make a curved plane and map your BG to that. As for your GI, I would just use VRay sun and match your shadowing to the image so it doesn't look strange.
If you imported as an image and not a texture, that might be the issue also.
To make a VRay material library in SU.
Create new SU material and map the diffuse texture to it.
Edit the scale to real world dims.
Open VR Material Editor and apply all settings, such as reflection, refraction, bumps, etc.
Save that material from the SKETCHUP Material editor to a new or existing 'VRay' material library.
The SU library making process is outlined here
http://sketchucation.com/resources/tutorials/528-how-to-create-your-own-sketchup-material-libraries
This is only available in 2.0, 1.49 did not save the material settings with the SKM file.
I would never wait 3-4 hours for any render. If you have multiple workstations, try setting up DR, that will cut your render times incredibly. I assume you are using 2.0?
3 second full res render... uh have your boss buy a time machine and go to 2030. Although RT is getting there. Watch this http://youtu.be/k1V8h7fsYmE?list=PL
This happens in inches also. All imported diffuse textures come in at 10"x10" as that scale is a SketchUp parameter and not saved in the vismat. I think the way around this is to import the vismat, edit the texture size in the SU material dialog, and then save these materials to a material library in SU, called V-Ray, that way you know those materials already have their settings applied. Just make sure that all the maps exist in a place that will stay put as you will lose your links if you ever move their location.
V-Ray also supports GPU with RT. If you stick to one of the cards at the top of this list, I bet you'll be in great shape.
Video Card Benchmarks - Over 1,000,000 Video Cards and 3,900 Models Benchmarked and compared in graph form - This page contains a graph which includes benchmark results for high end Video Cards - such as recently released ATI and nVidia video cards using the PCI-Express standard.
(www.videocardbenchmark.net)
You can also get a 3000 pixel interior rendering in 30 min out of V-Ray if you use DR on a network. How many workstations do you have in your office?
I am hearing that the GTX cards are great also. Currently VR 2.0 doesn't support channels with RT, but 3.0 in Max does, so I can only assume that this feature is on its way for us also.
Can anyone share their experience with RT using a Titan GPU?
Light leaks could mean low GI and sampler settings settings. Try one of the interior presets for high quality.
Plain and simple - Warehouse is full of crap. I would open each Warehouse file independently, clean as suggested above, try to render it VR by itself and ensure there are no errors. Also make sure you are the latest 2.0 release as there have been issues in the past with materials missing and then renders go blank.
Doesn't this have something to do with sub pixel mapping? Thought I read that on Peter Guthries blog.
Animated meshes are supported in 2.0 if you didn't know this already. My test mesh was exported from VR for Max from an OnyxTree OBJ sequence that was animated using the objloader script.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/objloader-v1-4
A lot of work just to get leaves to giggle, but sure is cool looking.
