Vray Material Library

[theantnest]

2nd post, Sorry I'm a new user with quite a few questions

Is there any way to save materials that I have created myself into the material library?

It seems like I should be able to just drag and drop the material over to the library, but nothing happens. And when I try to save a material into the folder in programfiles/chaosgroup/.../materials it says I don't have permission and points me to another folder.

Is it not possible to add to the material library, or am I just doing it the wrong way?

It would be really nice to have a second, user materials path that the library also references, so that you could keep your materials on the network or a shared folder. this would be amazing for people needing to work on projects across different machines, especially with regards to missing bitmaps, etc. An option to 'save all materials to user folder', that collected all Vray referenced files and saved them in a folder with the same name as the project would be amazing.

My normal SU materials path is a folder in my dropbox, so that when I'm out, any new materials are synced from my laptop and workstation. Would be so great if you could do it with Vray too..

[Ben Hurlbut]

It's not possible to add materials to the library through the interface right now, but you can add directories and vrmat files to the library folder (C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\V-Ray 3.4 for SketchUp\extension\materials) and they will show up in your library! You may have to restart SketchUp for new folders to show up, though.

[delineator]

Just to add to that: for our studio, I wrote a simple sync script, so new textures and vrmats are added to our network drive, and then synced down to the location above whenever the user restarts the computer. That works for us for now, although a custom library location option would be great!

[theantnest]

Just to add to that: for our studio, I wrote a simple sync script, so new textures and vrmats are added to our network drive, and then synced down to the location above whenever the user restarts the computer. That works for us for now, although a custom library location option would be great!

Yes, I was thinking of doing the same!

[konstantin_chaos]

Just to add to that: for our studio, I wrote a simple sync script, so new textures and vrmats are added to our network drive, and then synced down to the location above whenever the user restarts the computer. That works for us for now, although a custom library location option would be great!

Hi delineator,

Support for custom library locations is a feature that will be implemented in one of the upcoming updates.
Options for saving scene materials to a custom library will also be a nice addition and is something on our 'to do' list.

Regards,
Konstantin

[delineator]

Hi delineator,

Support for custom library locations is a feature that will be implemented in one of the upcoming updates.
Options for saving scene materials to a custom library will also be a nice addition and is something on our 'to do' list.

Regards,
Konstantin

I just wanted to bump and poke this a bit. For a while we were using a script to copy everything down from our shared asset drive. This became a bit cumbersome as our material library grew and it relied on our workstations AND render nodes to restart on a consistent basis (which does not happen on the headless render nodes), so I TRIED using some symbolic links (all on windows environment) so the materials folder would be pointed to the correct networked location. I am no expert using mklinks, and for some reason this caused our material library to get trashed over and over again. I'm assuming our file server didn't appreciate multiple people with different logins accessing the same folder via mklinks.

Anyway, now I'm trying out a local sync - basically a read only sync so it pulls down the material library from our asset server, but will update in real time whenever someone makes a new material , etc etc etc.

In the end, if we could still add a custom library location within vray, that would end up saving us a lot of headaches when it comes to both workstations and render nodes, as they wouldn't have to look for the material information on the c: drives, but rather the mapped network locations.

Thanks!

[Peter.Chaushev]

Thank you for your comment, it will be noted in our future discussions!
We are keen on enhancing the functionality of the Material library and add personalisation and customization options. There is no ETA yet, but it is planned as a feature in one of the next major updates.

Kind regards,
Peter