glass issues

[cgarness]

My office is evaluating sketchup rendering plugins and while V-Ray looks to be the most promising so far I am having some trouble given the lack of any tutorial. Although I use sketchup every day, I am prettymuch a rendering newbie, having only played around a bit with Viz 4 in the past and finally got frustrated with the learning curve.

I took an old massing model and tried to apply some glass materials and no matter how many different ways I adjust the reflection, refraction, diffuse and transparency settings I always get a solid reflective material in my test renders. See this link for images of the SketchUp model and the corresponding V-Ray rendering:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ggarness/VRayTests

I have tried to apply to one side of the material, two sides and noothing made a difference.

Any idea of what I am doing wrong?

Also, am I overlooking something or will VRay for Sketchup not have any basic materials in its library (because I can not locate them in Beta 2)?

cgarness

[cgarness]

I figured out where the materials are...

But will there be more of them in the final release? Different glasses, stones, woods, concretes, metals etc?

cgarness

[joe_b]

glass issues

The glass in beta2 has some issues. It will be resolved with beta3. As for our material library - I'm not sure if we willl have a larger material library to ship with our release, it would definately be a big positive for us, but I do not want to make promises we cannot keep.

Oh, and just in case you didn't locate our basic materials - they can be found in the Sketchup 5/Plugins/VRayForSketchUp/Materials folder. When you go to import/export a material it should take you to that folder by default.

[cgarness]

glass issues

Thanks Joe,

So far I am impressed with what I see in the V-ray plugin compared with all the other rendering plug-ins I've sampled. If you guys can make rendering as simple and intuitive as sketchup made modelling, you'll have a industry changing product on your hands.

I don't know what percentage of the sketchup market is architecture firms but I do know that all the young architecturals designers in my city have embraced it and I think this is true in many other cities as well. I would rather spend more time designing and less time fidgeting with technical details.

I think having a solid set of building materials (several stones, metals, glasses, woods, bricks, stuccos, tiles, bricks, etc) would be essential to an architectural firm considering using V-ray.

Looking forward to Beta 3...

Christopher

[tjboys_cg]

glass issues

I totally agree w/ Chris.

[joe_b]

glass issues

Thanks for the comments guys - I agree the material library additions are quite important. It has been a common request from our Rhino plugin as well.

[cgarness]

glass still an issue with Beta 3?

I downloaded Beta 3 and ran some architectural glass tests. From what I can tell transparency is still an issue. Totally clear glass does indeed now display refraction effects and you can sort of see what's beyond, but generally its still really, really dark... like black or bronze glass that in the real world would have a really low light transmittance of about 30%.

Is there anything I can do to give the glass on my building models a lighter look?

Gunnar

[joe_b]

glass issues

Yeah - we just caught this issue today actually. Disable the "Gamma Correct Colors" from the global options and that should lighten up your glass. The gamma corrected refraction color is the culprit.