Vray materials. Arg!

[dreamspace]

For starters... I'm having an awful time with getting the atmosphere right in the latest Vray update which I installed yesterday. For now, I've decided to go back to the previous build so I can keep working. Anyone else having issues?? But... I digress.

I'm finding it very difficult to deal with the lack of material choices in the Vray 2.0 to 3.0 upgrade so I'm forced to use my own in many cases. I'm an interior designer so I need to use specific fabrics, tiles, etc. for client approval. Sometimes my materials work but many times, they do not. I thought someone might be able to shed some light on any work-arounds I might try.

I also no longer see an option to add a reflection to any material that is not in the Vray options library. Is there something I'm missing? I've attached a screen shot.

And... Chaos... PLEASE, PLEASE FIX THE GLASS MATERIALS!!! Seeing glass as transparent in Sketchup would be a tremendous help instead of a solid black! I have to keep hiding the window glass to see what's behind it.

Thanks in advance!

FYI: I'm on a mac. Running Sierra. Sketchup 2017.

[Mousa_SA]

V-ray 3 has a lot of advance materials and options more than V-ray 2, and it's organized in a way to look much simpler for use . To add a new layer for your material, click the plus button at the Top of your materials layers:



If you want to Learn more about V-ray Materials. you could check Chaos Group Documentation page:
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...CHUP/Materials

Also you may check this tutorial :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2q8P6Aqk2M&t=127s

[delineator]

I think the bigger issue is that BRDF materials should be used when possible (as i understand it), and the older method of layering diffuse/refraction/reflection should not.

I personally had some issues translating custom materials from vray2 to vray3 - there is a script that ran in the background so when you imported a vrmat from vray2, it should have brought it in, however, at one point there was a bug so that all gammas for all textures was off in a weird way (one that was not fixable by making sure it was set to srgb). The odd thing is that if the material was remade in vray3 from scratch, using the same bitmaps and srgb, all was good. Don't know if this is not fixed in the most recent version or not, but worth keeping in mind.

Specifically for glass, there is nothing to fix as there is nothing broken. If you would like to use SKP's opacity slider that way, then you have to make your glass a specific way. I can't screenshot right now, but import one of the premade glasses - add a diffuse material layer on top and crank up the transparency slider to the max. Change the diffuse color to your preference (or texture) and then play with the SKP opacity slider as you like. Shouldn't effect the overall transparency of the material

[andybot_cg]

Yeah, unfortunately, like delineator says, you need a dummy layer to be able to use Sketchup transparency. I do hope the developers find a more straightforward workflow (to show transparency in SU) for glass.

[Peter.Chaushev]

Once you have created a glass material through the V-Ray Asset Editor, select it through the SketchUp material editor, choose "Edit" and lower the Opacity value. This will make the material transparent only in the viewport without affecting its V-Ray properties.
We are exploring some options to have this automated when creating V-Ray materials (feedback and suggestions are welcome!). However, it is a bit tricky since some of the users still keep creating materials through SketchUp and not V-Ray.

I'm having an awful time with getting the atmosphere right in the latest Vray update which I installed yesterday.

Could you please elaborate?

Kind regards,
Peter Chaushev

[andybot_cg]

We are exploring some options to have this automated when creating V-Ray materials (feedback and suggestions are welcome!). However, it is a bit tricky since some of the users still keep creating materials through SketchUp and not V-Ray.

It would be helpful if it were possible to apply a preset to a material made in Sketchup. Material creation and editing IMO is still a bit cumbersome in vfs3

[Mousa_SA]

(feedback and suggestions are welcome!).

Hi Peter,

Maybe to solve this issue, it could work like "Show in Viewport" icon.
Since we could make V-ray Materials transparent from the in the diffuse layer, Refraction and Opacity in the refraction, there could be a transparency icon beside each one, so we could decide which one would show on Viewport, and if someone don't want any of them to effect the Opacity slider in SketchUp, he could click the transparency again to grey it out, then he could play with the the Opacity slider in SketchUp if he want to make a specific type of presentation in SketchtUp.




-Then V-ray could save the status for Transparency for V-ray material when we save it to the Library (like show in viewport).

-The most annoying thing when we dealing with almost fully transparent material (240-255 R.G.B value) in Sketchup viewprot , is that navigating the model could become confusing, people could stuck with some faces and will keep scrolling with mouse to enter the space because they didn't notice that there is some transparent faces blocking them. So my suggestion is :

Maybe V-ray Materials Transparent Sliders could change SketchUp opacity slider with quadratic value, fully Transparent (RGB=255) would stay fully Transparent, and since all transparent V-ray Material in the Material Library don't have a 255 RGB value for Refraction color, maybe this concept could work fine.



-The transparency icon concept could come from Transparent Material preview in SketchUp material window.




-One last thing, I hope if V-ray 3 could upgrade "V-ray material" which come from V-ray 2 (Not the Standard Material) so we could add layers and bump and displacement to it.

[theantnest]

Maybe V-ray Materials Transparent Sliders could change SketchUp opacity slider with quadratic value, fully Transparent (RGB=255) would stay fully Transparent, and since all transparent V-ray Material in the Material Library don't have a 255 RGB value for Refraction color, maybe this concept could work fine.

I second this.

[noel.warren]

We are aware that material "translation" or "binding" is not ideal, though we feel it has come a long way. Currently: Color is handled out of the box, Texture we allow users to specify which. Opacity is ignored (with some very slight exceptions).

There are reasons for which this is the way it is. We hope to consolidate these though. Ideally we want to default to a color/texture/opacity that looks right and makes sense. But we would also like to give users control over what parameters are used for the SketchUp material.

So thanks for all your feedback. It will be taken into account.

[Mousa_SA]

Great news, thanks!, sounds like Texture Baking for textures map Preview is coming !