Workflow tips for a relative noob

[eliotbnz]

Hi all,

Been using vray for skp since May 2013 (sad I can remember that?). Love it generally, sketchup issues not withstanding, but I'm getting to the point where the time it takes to texture a reasonably detailed model is proving problematic. I am totally expecting that my workflow is wrong/slow and hoping you folks can suggest some ways to speed up the way I'm doing things

I have been using Artlantis and really enjoy the drag and drop nature of the materials. Obviously, the results are not quite the quality of vray however.

How do you all manage material/shader application? Do you have a library inside sketchup that directly translates to vray (similar to the express add on)? Or do you import your materials from a library? The latter is my approach but it is a very slow means to texture my models.

General hints and tips for speeding up the process of getting to the point of rendering would be great!

Thanks

Eliot

[wunnenstein]

I'm in the process of putting together a library myself at the moment. I think about this:

1. Raid drive with folders containing materials as the different textures like diff bump spec.

When I finished tweaking a material in a project I'd save it next to the texture as a vismat. Then next time using it I just import the vismat and the path structure should be right.
Another idea I just had is to import all the mats in one single sketchup file and applying it to a sample cube or something. So I could import just that skp file into a new project and sample the mats I'd need. Later I could purge the rest away.

Looking forward to what you come up with.

Cheers
W