evaluation so far

[nomeradona_cg]

im evaluating this rendering engine and so far these are my comments.

because of lack of help guides, you really have to spend alot of time in figuring out on the commands. particularly the materials.

using bitmaps really is complicated, as you have to scale them to .01 to .001 something. just hope on the next verion 1 is equivalent to your bitmap size. it will be very useful if it will follow the basic principle of SU. efficiency. our school bought the licesed pro and we are using it for our IB Arts and Design here. SU is very powerful and efficient in terms of modelling. so indeed if we have a dummy of vray material that you will see how to map it in the model i think it will be very useful. also i hope it will replicate the way su wrpa its bitmap on curve surface (just dont know how complicated it is) but again this is how i evaluate it. Efficiency is very important particularly to those users who have less time to experiment. That's the main purpose of SU anyway.

at the moment im still having difficulty in mapping bumps ( im spending alot of time in figuring how it works. (is it only work with blak and white bump maps, or can the colored materials can be use too as bumps).

vraylinkmtl seems to be working at the moment, but the quality of the presets vray vismat materials is awesome comparing to regularly maps wrap to vraymaterials. can you please shed some light on this.

do we have a fresnel IOR and glossiness table guides for different materials? it would be efficient if we have.

Rendering: i think its much faster.

Lights. the vray rectangular light is good. but still have difficulty with light parameters. In vraymax if i use multiplier ( no decay) it's very bright already. in vray SU im already using 500 its still not shown yet. i will attach some of my samples. so it seems parameter in su is different from the parameters in VRAYmax.

omni directional light. im still having difficulty in figuring it out specially the multiplier.

the potential of the vray engine in su is very good because the quality of rendering. but at the moment even to me who have a little background of using vray to max im finding it very time consuming in figuring out some fo the parameters. the help files that you have put is useful, but they are very basic. hope that we will have something like the one in spot3d. particulary sample rendering of different parameters.

by the way how can i insert image on this post. i click insert image only [img][/img]this came out.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: evaluation so far

I guess I'll start from the bottom up.

To post an image you've got to get it hosted on a site first. I use www.imageshack.us and it generates all the necessary code, so its really easy. And its free.

hope that we will have something like the one in spot3d.

Spot3d is a great resource, and I wish more people would use it. It explains every feature, and even though its for max 95% of things are the same. We will have our own counterpart in the future, but its pretty much going to be the same thing. Remember Vray is Vray whether its for Max/Rhino/Maya/SketchUp.

About the lights, I just posted a lighting tutorial yesterday, so give that a look over and then ask some more questions. I think it might clear some things up for you.

Bump maps need to be black and white. Wikipedia will probably do a good job explaining bumps, so give it a look.

With bitmaps, SketchUp handles mappings very weirdly so its going to take some work on our end to straighten it out. We know its not where it should be right now and its on our list of things that need to be addressed.

SU is very powerful and efficient in terms of modelling.

SketchUp is, for the most part, the equivelent of one tool in Max, so I'd use look at some other programs before you throw things out there. Efficient yes, but powerful..thats debatable.

To reiterated what I said before, Vray is Vray no matter what platform its being used in. And there are alot of resources out there for learning how to use Vray, and although they may not be for SketchUp, they are still very useful. I would first suggest looking at some of the Rhino tutorials because those will have largely the same interface, and then I would look at some of the tutorials on www.aversis.be as there are several good tutorials that start pretty much from scratch. We are trying to get tutorials out there ourselves, so check back with the tutorials section from time to time. I think we should have a materials tutorial some time next week so keep your eyes peeled for that.

do we have a fresnel IOR and glossiness table guides for different materials

Those would be very useful, so I'll try to get those into the tutorial.

Hope this clears up some of your concerns.

[joe_b]

Re: evaluation so far

using bitmaps is very complicated and we need to determine the best way to handle it. We've currently been under the assumption that people would apply and manipulate bitmaps via Sketchup's tools and then just use a linked V-Ray material. We really don't offer anything but the most basic uv mapping support at the moment since we have been relying on the native application for such things. But we will need to find a solution to integrate more easily into Sketchup as far as textures and materiality. Thanks for the feedback.

[nomeradona_cg]

Re: evaluation so far

thanks for the very useful comments.

dalomar:
i've read the light tutorial and its very very useful. appreciate it so much ;D
i want to go home now to test and set them up. my vray here in the school expired.

honestly that emissive material surprise me so much. when im checking all those materials section, i dont even have and idea what is it. now i know. thanks are those emmisive materials cast soft shadows too?

now i am attaching these initial renders. these renders actually took me lot of hours in figuring out lights. there were actually time of frustrations in which i almost dont want to consider to try vray anymore and ask the school to forget about it. anyhow after seeing some of those images rendered in vray, i am motivated not to give it up. you guys i know are doing your best to put up the hlepfiles and tutorial, we really appreciate that.

anyway here are some of the initial rendered test.




[img]http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/5862/practice4sz9.jpg[/im

the fourth image was actually my first, where i almost gave up.

i havent tried many things with the engine, but the inital results motivates me more to continue trying it. its very promising.

please feel free to comment what else need to improved.

[nomeradona_cg]

Re: evaluation so far

the fourth image

[nomeradona_cg]

Re: evaluation so far

by the way. all of the above pictures are raw images. No post processing.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: evaluation so far

The lighting looks like a good start, so you are definitely on your way. Glad you got something from the tutorial and was able to follow it. This is the first one I've written for sketchup, so I tried to make sure that it was straight forward and simple. To start Vray can be a bit overwhelming, and even more so if you don't have that much of a background with rendering. Once you get going with it you'll find things get much better, and the results can be amazing. Keep working with it, and don't be afraid to experiment and have fun.