I´m having a lot of problems trying to find a good way to convert vray materials from 3ds Max to Sketchup. In 3ds Max 2016 I´m using vray 3.2 and in Sketchup the latest vray demo. The vrmat converter script is supposed to save vrmats for Sketchup which I´m supposed to import. The problem is that this works not at all. Maybe the materials are too complex, but so far I´m not getting any serious results.
In the original scene I´m having a multi-sub material with 5 ids (for a tree with different materials for trunk, branches and leaves). Each of these leaf materials is 2-sided and contains sublayers. When exporting such a material (either as single or the whole scene materials), the loaded material in Sketchup contains hundreds and hundreds of materials (one for every leaf of a tree) that are basically empty. No textures are assigned correctly and none of the layers inside of the materials translate.
I was hoping to convert an entire tree library to Sketchup with vray, but so far I´m stuck and don´t know if that would be possible at all.
Creating the materials from scratch is not really an option since after spending 2 hours trying to recreate these materials in Sketchup I gave up.
Any one know a good method how to convert materials ?
Ah, I´ve also tried to export a vrmesh and use this for the materials, but that doesn´t work either …
I am not familiar with how they export vrmats from 3dsmax - have you tried posting in the 3dsmax forum? They might be able to help you more. But in general there are complications with exporting materials from 3dsmax. V-Ray can only really export V-Ray specific textures and materials. So if your library makes heavy use of 3dsmax procedural textures, or other non V-Ray plugins, they will not really translate well.
Hi Joe,
thanks. I found out that the 2-sided material causes a lot of problems and using a multi-material as well. If I try to convert the vray material itself (without being embedded into a 2-sided and multi-material) I can at least re-import this as vrmat into Sketchup vray. There are more issues, for example the scaling of textures / bitmaps. Once applied to geometry in Sketchup, I need to set the uv scaling to 0.01 in order to work, while the original imported textures from a FBX file work fine. So I guess there are several issues that are not addressed. The procedural textures within the vray material in 3ds max are not a problem as it seems. I´m just using gradient maps and fallof maps.
So, if you have a chance to look at the export script, I think it would really help many others.
I would also suggest either posting this in the Max forums or contacting support@chaosgroup.com with a clear outline of the functionality you expected to see in the exporter and a description of the bug that you have come across with the exporter not working.
I hope this helps, if you have any additional questions please let me know.