Vray Materials

[willmclaughlin13]

I am fairly new to vray, and I am doing a lot of experimenting recently. Currently, I am modeling and rendering a high end rendering computer, (A computer rendering a rending computer )
My first question is: I am using a material called Graphite and one called chrome Glaze. Both of these are made by chaosgroup (I think) and both of them are jet black in the model. This means that 80% of my model is completely dark and impossible to see unless I select it or go into a group, is there any way around this? Can I assign a color to the material before the render without effecting the rendered material?
My next question is: sometimes my materials...fail. They start rendering as just black, no reflection/diffuse/emission. I have to load a fresh material (so graphite fails, I make graphite1 etc.) I don't know why these fail, but it is very inconvenient in a fairly complicated model.
My last question is: is there any way to say "every face with "graphite" now has "graphite1" so I don't have to stumble around with the jet black model where everything looks the same?

Here are some screenshots to make it more clear:
Jetblack:
Selected:
Out of group:
Rendered(albeit a little outdatted to the model):

[andybot_cg]

Great looking renders! Good studio setup you have.

For materials, you can add a second diffuse layer with the same black color, and on the first diffuse layer (the one that's connected to sketchup) you would change the transparency to a texture "texAlpha" and set the color to white. This then masks out that first diffuse layer and you can change it to anything you want in the Sketchup editor.

There are some bugs in vray where materials sometimes aren't saved properly when exiting sketchup. I would suggest saving your material as a .vismat (save as from the vray material editor.) If your material gets lost, you can just reload it instead of having to reapply a new material everywhere. Hope that helps!

-Andy

[willmclaughlin13]

Great looking renders! Good studio setup you have.

For materials, you can add a second diffuse layer with the same black color, and on the first diffuse layer (the one that's connected to sketchup) you would change the transparency to a texture "texAlpha" and set the color to white. This then masks out that first diffuse layer and you can change it to anything you want in the Sketchup editor.

There are some bugs in vray where materials sometimes aren't saved properly when exiting sketchup. I would suggest saving your material as a .vismat (save as from the vray material editor.) If your material gets lost, you can just reload it instead of having to reapply a new material everywhere. Hope that helps!

-Andy

Great advice, thank you. I will try this soon, I want to let my render finish

[willmclaughlin13]

Much nicer! Thank you very much!