Old Material Library

[ValeroStudio]

Is it possible to get a copy of the old material library from VR5? I miss many of the materials that did not transfer over to Cosmos. Waters, metals, glasses... so many are missing.

[Peter.Chaushev]

Hello, Matthew,
The Material Library available in V-Ray 5 for SketchUp is currently being migrated to Chaos Cosmos.
Progress is being made daily and we hope to have it completed soon.

In the meantime, you can still reuse the old material library if you have downloaded it using V-Ray 5 by importing it as a Custom Library folder:


The location to the old vrmat files is:
Windows: %UserProfile%\Documents\V-Ray Material Library\AEC\materials\v5.0\Materials
macOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/ChaosGroup/V-Ray\ Material\ Library/AEC/materials/v5.0/Materials

Kind regards,
Peter

[ValeroStudio]

Excellent!!! Thank you Peter.

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi ValeroStudio,

Last week another big chunk of materials was added to the Cosmos library.
Note that we'll be improving the Cosmos-side UX when it comes to browsing and filtering materials.
The great thing about Cosmos is that you do not have to wait for a new V-Ray version to get the content and UX upgrade.

Konstantin

[ValeroStudio]

This is great news. Thank you!

[robbie_bruins]

Hi,

So I want to import the Standard vray materials library back in the asset editor. But after reinstalling vray 6 and such I lost the old vray 5 user folders. Bad times
I did find a material library in the program files directory but when I try to link that the vray asset editor displays a fancy blue lock symbol which probably means just "no"


Where can I get a backup of the vray 5 material library which I then can reference into the asset editor? Anyone?
I do not want to have to keep downloading and importing even the simplest of materials from the cosmos browser, I just want my materials in the asset editor.
I use materials from a wide array of sources and being able to acces these from the asset editor is key for texturing speed.

Thanks


**So I did figure out a workaround which is manually downloading the assets from the cosmos browser and manually saving each material as a vrmat file in a folder, If someone could spare me the time and share a download link to the same end result I would be very grateful**

[natalia.gruzdova]

Hello robbie_bruins,

As Peter shared in his post, should you have installed V-Ray 5 the old Material Library can be loaded manually from specified default locations.
Please note that Cosmos Browser has a number of other materials that are not included in the old V-Ray 5 Material Library and more will be added in the future.

Regarding why the library was moved please take a look at Konstantin's post and I wanted to add that having assets and materials all in one place brings a more universal approach to many users that work with V-Ray in several host-applications, as this way all the materials are created uniformly and rendering results are consistent in every application.

[patrick_anderson]

I get the idea of the cosmos thing but not having the materials in the vRay main menu I find to be a bit of an arse. Also, why are there so few wood materials in the cosmos window?

My only other complaint is you use a proprietary file format for your materials. Back in the day I could just swap out bitmaps but as you seemed to have locked it, I either have to create from scratch or make do with a material you have.

[natalia.gruzdova]

Hello patrick_anderson,
Please see my answers below:

Also, why are there so few wood materials in the cosmos window?

Contrary to the old V-Ray 5 materials library that had one combined Wood & Laminate category - there are two separate categories in the Cosmos Browser: Wood and Wood flooring. The overall number for the wooden materials is bigger than in the old library.

My only other complaint is you use a proprietary file format for your materials.

Are you referring to the .tx textures file format? Please kindly note that this is a widely used file format and it was also used in the old V-Ray 5 materials library.
Tx is a tiled and mipmapped texture format that is used for optimizations which improve overall render time and memory usage.
You can edit .tx textures directly with V-Ray material editing tools (e.g. color correction) or if necessary you can open them as .tiff to edit and resave, however resaving will lose the mip-maps and optimization benefits.