Sketchup scene won't render

[ptocco]

I'm nearing the end of my VRay trial and we must make a decision soon. But things are going very badly! I have a large trade show model with some animated sequences set up. Vray has worked fine up till now for still renderings, but now it keeps trying to render the wrong scene no matter where I am when I begin the render. It is also treating some materials as invisible or background material, or some strange thing. I'm wondering if there are limitations I'm bumping against, in terms of total polygons (137,000 edges for example) or the capacity of my video card, an Nvidia Quadro Pro FX 560.

Please help soon as I'm in a fix at the moment and must figure out what to do. If Vray proves to have good support that will definitely help sway me in favor of buying.

Peter

[Jackson_cg]

Re: Sketchup scene won't render

Can't see how your video card (which is very well supported anyway) could cause any problems with renders as, AFAIK graphics cards currently play no role in the render process, only in displaying the SU viewport.

If you've set your visopt up to save out animations it will always start with the first scene in SU. If you want to start at another scene you'll have to change the order of your scenes in SU or untick "Include in animation" in SU for scenes you don't want. If you just want to render single scenes in V-Ray, then just disable "Save File" under "Render Output" and "On" under "Animation" both on the"Output" tab in V-Ray's Options Editor.

There is a known bug in V-Ray for SU caused by dodgy SU code which causes SU to "forget" to inform VfSU of material changes, which ASGvis are actively working on fixing. It's very easily worked around by simply saving the skp file, closing it and reopening it. If your materials show up as invisible after that, then there must be something wrong with how your materials are set up; transparency maps too high for example.

Regards,
Jackson

[arqramos]

Re: Sketchup scene won't render

I've had problems before when I "group" objects instead of making them "components". Sometimes groups just won't show up on my final render.

[thomthom]

Re: Sketchup scene won't render

I've had problems before when I "group" objects instead of making them "components". Sometimes groups just won't show up on my final render.

This is a known bug, due to a bug in SU that doesn't report the correct data back to V-Ray.
Reopen the file and it should render fine again.

[ptocco]

Re: Sketchup scene won't render

Thanks so much for the great answers. I unchecked Animation, and sure enough, it works! And the materials are all there now. Vray has been out for quite a few years now. I remember what a splash it made back around 2002 when I was still using 3D Viz. I was never able to justify the cost then but now I have a good reason to buy it. It seems the technology is getting very mature, not very many bugs anyway, unlike the old days in Viz when problems were always cropping up.

Now I'm moving on to the finer points of achieving good results, as in lighting. So I will post my next question at the top of the queue. Thanks again!

Peter Tocco
www.plainview3d.com
www.baltimorphosis.com