Vray invalid materials

[Pretty Picture Girl]

@Palosanto

Yes and their way to use of Teamviewer is the next thing I do not appreciate, if you use TeamViewer for anything professional related you are required to buy a license.
They surely have a legal licence at their end, but most clients are unlikely to have one.
The prices teamviewer calls out for a license are prohibitivly high for small offices.
So, Chaosgroup indirectly forces users to illegaly use TeamViewer on the users end if that enduser wants to have issues sorted out issues relating to their professional work. If they would use Skype instead we could do this legally.
Further I do not want grant full access to my machine to outsiders like Chaosgroup.

Regarding stuff that will be fixed in the next version. Well how about they fix version 3 fully before they ask their users to shell out more money for the next update (which is likely to have a lot of new problems...).

[palosanto]

@Palosanto

Yes and their illegal use of Teamviewer is the next thing I do not appreciate, if you use TeamViewer for anything professional related you are required to buy a license.
They surely have a legal licence at their end, but most clients are unlikely to have one.
The prices teamviewer calls out for a license are prohibitivly high for small offices.
So, Chaosgroup indirectly forces users to illegaly use TeamViewer on the users end to sort out issues relating to their professional work. If they would use Skype instead we could do this legally.
Further I do not want grant full access to my machine to outsiders like Chaosgroup.

Regarding stuff that will be fixed in the next version. Well how about they fix version 3 fully before they ask their users to shell out more money for the next update (which is likely to have a lot of new problems...).

wow, wow, hold your horses ... they don't 'force you' to use Teamviewer. I think your frustration and anger start to make me uncomfortable so I'm done.

[Pretty Picture Girl]

Ok I pacified my last bit a tad, still I do not appreciate the way they support.

[Peter.Chaushev]

First of all, I would like to thank you all for the openness of your feedback provided in this and other forum threads. I can assure you we always take seriously our user community.

There are multiple channels of communication with the V-Ray for Rhino team, one of which being this forum. Reports from threads we have not personally replied to are still being logged and classified together for further internal discussion. There are no exceptions. While most suggestions and wish lists are not implemented directly, they are always weighed up in the form of discussion and then aggregated together to form user stories, improvement and new feature tickets or help reorganize our priority lists. It is not uncommon for a single user request to directly reshape a part of our software.
With all this in mind, a new platform for the V-Ray Next for Rhino beta community is currently being prepared. We do hope it will be more comfortable and easy to use and eliminate a lot of the hassle for users who simply wish to express thoughts.


Now let me explain the logic behind why we decided to drop off support for old material plugins.

A change in V-Ray materials was first introduced in 2012 with V-Ray 1.5 for Rhino. Instead of containing data in binary form all newly created V-Ray Material (.vismat) files from then on were xml-based. Throughout the years, the ability to read the old (up to v1.49) type of .vismat files was preserved due to compatibility concerns (vismats from v1.5 or later still load just fine).

With the launch of V-Ray 3.4 in 2017 support was dropped for versions older than v2.0. Later on, after a long period of gradual advancements in both V-Ray for Rhino and SketchUp a point was reached where maintaining that compatibility was obstructing further development of the material structures. The ability to read the old binary vismats was dropped in July 2018 with the release of v3.60.03. This decision was further backed up by data pointing out only a small minority of users still utilizing such legacy files.

We understand for those who still kept projects with pre-2012 data within, the frustrating part was actually the multitude of prompt messages which needs to be overcome. This was an unforeseen situation which did indeed cause some confusion.

The proposed workaround is simple and the scale of the issue small enough to consider it as a sufficient solution. The attached script was devised to automate the whole process and considerably shorten what might otherwise be a lengthy manual process.
If assistance to run the script is required, my colleagues from our Support team are eager to help.
As an alternative to working with scenes containing such legacy data, v3.60.02 is available for download.


Regarding the lack of updates - ever since the launch of V-Ray 3 for Rhino beta about 2 years ago the dev team has implemented an extensive amount of new features, including entirely new user interface and DR manager, hybrid rendering, Grasshopper integration and many others. These are the biggest updates we've ever shipped. Based on telemetry data and support request tracking v3.60.03 was deemed objectively stable. Furthermore, many of the proposed solutions for outstanding issues required a bump in the V-Ray Core version or a deeper approach in our code which in turn lead to something which was overdue - a large part of the old code needed revisiting to ensure our product can catch up more swiftly with our other flagship products. This meant beginning active development on v4.0 early on while monitoring for crucial bugs in the current v3.6.

Moving on to V-Ray Next has been a huge endeavor so far. Simply adding v4.0 core features is just a small part of the work being done by our developers. V-Ray for Rhino and V-Ray for SketchUp have been restructured from the ground up to ensure an improved foundation for all future development and cut out all legacy code which may obstruct future improvements and implementation of core features. While much of this work will go unnoticed 'under the hood', I hope the sheer performance gain and subsequent increase in frequency of new versions will make up for it.

Kind regards,
Peter

[Pretty Picture Girl]

Well, just came by this, in my eyes still stupid, issue again.
For the benefit of others who perhaps need a quick way to get at least fast to their own geometry without all these installation and up- and downgrade games, here is one way around this:

1) Open Rhino
2) Switch Renderer to Rhino instead of Vray
3) Disable Vray in plugin control in Rhino
4) Restart Rhino
5) Now Rhino defaults to its in built render engine during start
6) Open the file you could not open before
7) Remove the Version 2 Textures in this file completly & save your file under a different name


You lose some materials and textures this way, but, at least you've got your geometry recovered.
Reenable Vray if you want . You have to have the old textures removed or replaced before, or the problem returns.
Now you can decide if you stick to Vray for the future & retexture for it, or if switch to alternatives like Blender with Eevee and Cycles