Texture Aspect Ratio

[mjm223]

(I've asked this question many times but never get a response. Now that this issue has come up again, I'm throwing my hand out for some guidance here...)

When you create a material entirely through V-Ray (such as via the Material Editor or Material Studio), is it possible to control the size and aspect ratio of the material? I've made several vismats from the V-Ray Material Studio, but when I import those vismats into a SketchUp file, the texture is always resized to a 10"x10" square. This has become quite a pain, especially since most of the texture images I use are not squares. (As a result, I have to unlock the aspect ratio in the SketchUp Material Editor and then refer to the pixel dimension of the texture to manually calculate how long the texture will be if I make it a certain height.)

I know some of you are probably thinking, "Why not just use the SketchUp Material Editor to add the textures and then apply the relative maps in the V-Ray Material Editor?" I've tried this, but the truth is I prefer the V-Ray Material Studio. It's a powerful tool that has a lot of advantages such as...

- A larger preview window so I can see more detail
- I can load maps much faster (when the SketchUp model gets a certain size, I typically get long pauses after loading each map or adding new layers)
- I get much fewer crashes from testing previews
- I can add and delete textures without it affecting the SketchUp Material Editor (sometimes materials I delete from the V-Ray Material Editor remain on the SketchUp Editor and vice-versa)
- Since the Material Studio is a standalone, I can create bundles of materials on a computer that doesn't have V-Ray (such as my home computer) and then import them into the model the next day I'm back in the office. (If I try to work on a model at home and then bring it back to work to render, I have manually relink all of my maps and textures since V-Ray automatically "extracts" all of the textures to a local folder that none of my DR slaves can access.)

...these are just to name a few.

I'd be very appreciative to anyone who has any suggestions or advice.

[andybot_cg]

Not sure there's any solution to this. I've taken to naming my vismat files with the width and height in the file name - for ex: "tile01_64x64.vismat" and then manually adjusting the material in the sketchup material editor.

Also, note that the material studio editor is several versions old and afaik doesn't support all the features of the current vray material editor that's in sketchup.

[mjm223]

I was afraid of that. I had actually started naming my textures that way too, but I've got a couple thousand textures in my database. I've been renaming them as I use them, but it gets to be a pain, especially if I'm on a deadline.

Yeah, it kinda stinks that the Material Studio is out of date, but so far it has only become an issue when I download vismats from other people who made them from the current version of VfSU. Hopefully they'll make an updated version after the new build comes out, but from what I've been reading in the posts, this is pretty low on their priority list

[andybot_cg]

The other trick I use with materials is that I save them in an SU material library (as .skm format). As long as vray is disabled when I load it the texture into my scene, the material comes in with the vray properties, plus at the correct SU scale. (However, if vray is loaded, perversely, it re-sets the vray properties of the material, so you lose your vray layers.)

[mjm223]

That sounds pretty neat. How do you "disable" V-Ray, though? Does it involve a ruby script or something?

[dkendig]

You can disable our plugin by going to the SketchUp menu "Window" -> "Preferences", then click on "Extensions" on the left, then uncheck "V-Ray for SketchUp" on the right. The next time you load SketchUp, our plugin will not load by default (restarting SketchUp is required). You can then manually load our plugin by checking the box next to our plugin again in the Extensions preferences.