Vray/Sketchup automatic material assignment query

[pias]

gday guys,

I am currently using sketchup in Architecture and trying to integrate the vray plugin to make more proffessional renderings, a major strength of the program is its photoshop-esque way of applying materials with the paint bucket but i am having trouble with going back to re-assigning vray materials seperately once the model is complete. Especially because the vray materials arent visible it gets annoying rendering a tiny image to see how your materials are coming up rather than being able to view them clearly in the openGL viewport.
Lighting and all the environment settings can be templated so they are not so much of an iussue, but i was wondering if it were possible to link the vray materials to the sketchup ones or layers, at the moment i am having to explode the model and select by material to assign the vray materials but i would much rather having a standard list of materials that render according to the material or layer of the sketchup objects by default.
If anyone knows how to do this or has another method of distributing materials within a model please let me know.

cheers

[thomthom]

Re: Vray/Sketchup automatic material assignment query

The service release of V-Ray for SketchUp syncronizes all the SketchUp materials and V-Ray materials. So when you create a SU material it appear in the V-Ray material list and vise versa. And the service release also have some function to apply by layer etc when you right click the material in the V-Ray material window.

[Vinch]

Re: Vray/Sketchup automatic material assignment query

But what happen if I want to apply a bump image.
Let's say that I scale every texures on surface in sketchup...
and then I chose the right bump image appropriate for that texture.
Does V-ray SR scale automatically also the bump image according to the image I scale in Sketchup?

[thomthom]

Re: Vray/Sketchup automatic material assignment query

The bump map will use the texture coordinates of SU, yes. In fact the SU map coordinates are the only ones available to you.

[thomthom]

Re: Vray/Sketchup automatic material assignment query

Actually, that wasn't quite correct. As long as you set your maps to use Explicit Map Channel it will use the SU texture co-ords. You can choose some other options, but they are not very predictable.

One problem is when you have just a colour in your diffuse and want to apply a bump map for instance. You then have to add a dummy texture in your diffuse channel and map that correctly in SU. You then set that diffuse layer to fully transparent and then create a new diffuse channel underneath which will be the one seen. You then have mapping coordinates you can use for your bump etc.

[dcauldwell_cg]

Re: Vray/Sketchup automatic material assignment query

Faced with a similar issue recently (white painted brickwork), I started with the bump map, copied it and then made the copy completely white (or whatever colour you require).
I then applied this monochrome 'texture' to the model and assigned the bump map in vray.
The monochrome 'texture' had two functions - 1) to apply the colour 2) to set the SU texture co-ords
It worked well.

Regards

David