Oh, I didnt even think of those. I was going to use Smart Drop.

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Anyone suggest a plugin to place the 4 wheels of a car on a topo terrain? Smart Drop and other 'drop' plugins don't seem to align the car with the surface. 1001 bit had a feature for doing this, but it caused a Bugsplat, so it may be broken in 2016.

Edit -
I think I found my answer - Smart Drop At Intersection seems to do the trick. Thanks me!!!

ThruPaint is fantastic!

1 - Could be an old vismat created with an older version
2- the vismat might be referencing an external texture that is not on your machine, look into the maps and see if they are pointing in the right direction.

It seems that Maxwell already does something similar using Pixar subdivision.

Any way to have Subd work after you start a rendering? Example, like how Skatter has a Render Only feature. You would keep your model in SU set to its lowest subs value for poly economy, but when you render, it will up the sub value and render the high quality version?

You cant depend on solely exterior light to render an interior. You need to add lights, the same way you would need to light a space in real life. Sometimes I add a couple of planes just inside the windows to fake in some more light, but you definitely need more lights in your scene or you are going to get splotchy renders.

I was getting sick of waiting, sick of old bugs, sick of lack of any news or development. How long are you going to wait for a beta? They are already on VR3.3 in Max. Then once you get into beta, you are looking at least 8+ months before an actual release. Who knows, maybe they are already in beta without telling us. Maybe it will come out next week? This is my point, we are in complete darkness. What are you supposed to do with that?

I can tell you from my current experience, any lost time from your existing material libraries and proxies will be made up pretty quickly. It takes me a 1/10th of the time setting up a model for rendering in Thea than it did in VRay. Being able to actually use a real-time engine will take out a lot of the guess work that you are used to and the material presets in Thea are just plain easy.

Simple experiment - download and install a demo of Thea, open your heaviest scene, start Presto AO, running directly in the SketchUp window. Now do this with V-Ray RT.

Make the conclusion yourself.

I stopped using light portals. The render times were isane and I did not find that added to the quality of the image, just use regular rectangular lights if you must.

Change in workflow sucks, but as a person involved in the beta testing I can tell you that we test it, make sure it isn't junk and report back. The trays were annoying me initially and now they are part of my workflow. Trimble has done a great job with SketchUp I have to say. Imagine if it went over to Autodesk!!!

I have read a bunch of forums and watched a bunch of YouTube videos on it, but I still don't think there is a clean way to send a SketchUp file to Unreal. Please correct me if I am wrong. I can get my SketchUp model into Unreal Engine, with textures, even with the 2 UV channels, but when I run a Build, something still seems like it is off. The lighting seems really dark and some of the faces of my model are black.

I tried the Blender method, but that did not seem to work so I tried FBXing the model through Ultimate UnWrap Pro, which was the most successful, but I am wondering what I might be missing. Ideally I would love to export the FBX right from SU with textures, but I am not having any success.

Has anyone succeeded at this?

This might do the trick!!! Thanks TIG!

I am looking for a plugin that would take a group and then try to fill that group's shape in with a selected component(s). For example, take a model of a car and try to replicate the shape with a component of a small cube, to make a pixelated version of that model. Anyone know of anything like this?

Roo, Did you get any help yet?

Contact support. They seem to have fixed the issue in a nightly build.

My understanding is that this cannot be done with VRay for SketchUp, at least not within the material.

Profile Builder and it is worth every penny! Get this plug in today and you will never look back.

Any way to get it to work in reverse as well???

Saving to 32 bit EXR files, I have a glass material with a refraction layer. When I open the EXR file, my glass is seen as transparent to the Alpha channel, even though there is stuff behind it. Am I doing something wrong when setting this material up, or is this an issue with saving to EXR? Notice that its only happening along with the Fresnel Perpendicular. It's weird, right?