Future of VRay cross-application compatibility?

[duke2]

So we now have VRay for Max, Maya, Cinema4D, Sketchup and Rhino, and others that I've probably missed. What IS missing however, is compatibility between them. Within this office for example, I couldn't have people working in Sketchup with VRay, and pull in the skp file and VRay materials in tact.

Are there plans at all to have an intermediate markup (ie. xml) that saves material definitions, render settings, etc.? We have vrscene, but it would be nice to pull that apart, so that a vrscene can optionally reference individual materials, meshes, etc. I understand the main obstacle here is inconsistent support of native features. For example, we have Bercon's great plugins, but they're only in Max. There are also vray shaders that won't always be in another program, like DistanceTex is only in 2.0, and Water is only in Maya, but surely these could simply be ignored in a host application that doesn't support it.

What does everyone else think? Have you worked in a pipeline with people working in another application, but with VRay, and have been a little miffed about not being able to bring in their stuff with the materials in tact?

Here's some made-up stuff that isn't xml, because xml is awful:

import maxDefaults "MaxDefaults.vrsl"

shader.defaults = maxDefaults

shader.Root = VRayBlendMtl "RedPlastic"
(
	Base = VrayMtl "JustRed"
	(
		Diffuse = Color[255, 0, 0]
		Reflection = Map 2
	)
)

# Map id name
Map 1 "RedTexture" Bitmap
(
	FileName = "C:\Red.jpg"
)

Map 2 "Map2" ColorCorrect
(
	Source = Map 1
	Gamma = 0.8
)

[vlado]

Are there plans at all to have an intermediate markup (ie. xml) that saves material definitions, render settings, etc.?

Yes Although not XML (which I don't like either).

Best regards,
Vlado

[timdog]

+1! Would be a huge timesaver as I often need to transfer models from max to maya.
How difficult would it be to write some maxscript to "custom text file" to maya ?? (As you can see Im not that programmer savvy )

[darbo]

Our office uses Vray for both 3ds Max and Sketchup. The ability to transfer models initially set up in Sketchup to 3ds Max would be an incredibly great feature. Vray for Sketchup works great - especially for our lead design architects and interior designers who will never have the time to learn 3ds Max. But models developed in Sketchup can too quickly tax its feeble memory limits. It would be wonderful if a too-large Sketchup scene could be seamlessly ported to and rendered in 3ds Max Vray if need be. Cross platform compatibilty would make it very easy for us to purchase several more licenses of Vray (mainly Sketchup) as Vray would be our office's go-to rendering solution.

David