V-ray materials don't change after adjusted with sketchup in Vray 3.4

[ebrahim.1991]

I recently upgraded to Vray 3.4 from Vray 2. With the old software, any changes I made to a material in the Sketchup Viewport (mainly by using the match color tool) were reflected in the Vray material editor, and rendered accordingly. This no longer happens in V-ray 3.4; any changes made to the material color do not effect the material's diffuse file in V-ray. Using the 'linear workflow' option does display a color change, but their is a significant difference in the color of the material in the Sketchup viewport and in the V-ray preview window. Please help me solve this issue, or is this perhaps something that'll be addressed in future V-ray updates?

P.S: I have tried using V-ray with both Sketchup 2016 and 2017, but this problem still persists. Didn't happen with the old version of V-ray, though

[Peter.Chaushev]

Hello,

Texture colorization using the SketchUp material editor does not affect how the material is rendered in V-Ray. An exception to this rule are textures which are embeded into the SketchUp project (their source images not being on the hard drive).
So, simply clicking the "Reset Color" button from the SketchUp material editor will resolve your problem. You can achieve the same result using a Color Correction texture in the V-Ray Asset Editor.
Our developers are looking into possible solutions for workflows using the SketchUp material colorization option.

As for the "Linear workflow" options. It should be enabled only for materials created with previous versions of V-Ray.For further info about the changes to the way gamma is being calculated in V-Ray 3.4 for Sketchup, go to https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...vious+Versions

Kind regards,
Peter

[ebrahim.1991]

Thanks so much! Clicking the 'Reset Color' button changes the color back to the original, so I'm not sure how that is supposed to help apply color changes from sketchup to vray, but using the 'Color Correction' texture did the trick for me. However, it seems to me that I may be doing something wrong that led to the failure of the 'Reset color' method, so could you please elaborate how its supposed to work?

[Peter.Chaushev]

As I mentioned in my previous post, colorization of textures is not supposed to work with V-Ray right now (in most cases). The only way we support doing the same result is through the V-Ray Color Correction texture.
We recognize this is not ideal and are looking into possible solutions.

If you have trouble with specific texture or material, try recreating the material from scratch using only V-Ray and not the SketchUp material editor.

Kind regards,
Peter

[gkosicki]

Good morning,

I can hardly understand how is it possible not to bring this functionality from v-ray 2.0 to 3.x ...

Could you please put some light on this case? Do you know when is it going to be implemented? It's been almost a year since last comment on this case.

Kind regards,
Greg

[Peter.Chaushev]

Here's what happens in V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp:
1. for each SketchUp material created, there is a V-Ray material counterpart and vise versa. These pairs of SketchUp - V-Ray materials are synchronized at all times
1. the moment a material with texture is colorized through the SketchUp Material editor, a new version of the texture is created and the new texture file replaces the original one in both SketchUp and V-Ray materials
2. this new texture file is stored within the SketchUp file project and also exported by V-Ray 2.0 in a temp folder while the current worksession is ongoing

After consideration, it was decided not to bring back this behavior due to the asset replacement it forces. V-Ray works better with image files from the hard drive, instead of Bitmap buffers directly from the .skp project file.
Furthermore, using V-Ray's Color Correction texture provides a lot more control and allows fine-tuning of all textures, not just the ones assigned to the Diffuse slot.

There are a couple of workarounds you can use if you still wish to continue using the old method:
- after colorizing a material, click the "Edit texture image in external editor" button next to the texture filepath in the SketchUp material editor, save the new image and then load it back manually
- Colorize a material, then delete the original texture image file, save the SketchUp project and reload it. With the image file missing, V-Ray will use the Bitmap buffer from the SketchUp project instead.

Kind regards,
Peter