We are an architectural studio which is thinkning about buying the vray aplication
for the sketchup.
So i have downloaded the trial version of it. I have one major problem with it
Can anybody please explain me what does it mean U and V in materiel size, we are working in
milimeters or meters units. I do understand it is some kind of texture size but When i have putted in
the U or V box number 1 it makes a terrible noise like a million little textures. When i have putted
0.01 it has worked but it makes no sense. The size of the object was 1x1x1 meter.
Please explain that it will be clear to me, so i can put the order on my boss’s table.
I am finding it much easier to use ‘linked’ materials. That is, you apply materials in sketchup, make any adjustments you want in sketchup and in the vray linked material add reflective layers, bumps etc. So you don’t need to bother with the u, v, settings at all.
see this posting for an example Chaos: Industry-leading design and visualization software
I don’t know how it works - but it does.
When you apply the bump map in vray materials to the linked material (which is the same image size as the texture image applied in sketchup) it just matches up.
This is by no means an official explanation (Joe can give you that), but here’s my understanding of whats going on.
By default objects in SketchUp do not have any UV information (which is basically the texture space coordinates of an object). So that means that that information has to be created. You can do this within our texture options, but its quite cumbersome to do it that way and there aren’t really very many options. The second way is to use SketchUp to generate the UV information. That requires using SU mapping tools and setting up a linked material. Now once you’ve done that, the UV information that is created can then be accessed by mappings within a V-Ray material. Hence the reason why bump mappings will line up with the map of the linked material. Hope this helps/makes sense. For more info on setting up linked materials please consult the V-Ray for SketchUp manual.
Minimar
1-if everything (textures/materials) are already set up in sketchup then you don’t need to do anything - it will render with those settings (as with the brick in the example below). You only realy need to create linked materials or add vismat materials when you want to improve on what you get with sketchup. So for instance you may want decent reflections off materials, or add bumps, only then do you need to use the linked and vray materials.
2- see the example below. the left and right faces had a a brick texture applied in sketchup. However, the face on the right has had a vray (plain) material applied to it. You can see that it has overwitten the sketchup material. To answer your second point - this is a plain vray material with a bump.
3 - not sure what you mean with question 3!
Hope this helps:-
(if all else fails - read the manual!!)
as for my question one : still no answer because i do not want to use only linked material and why? because it is not only about bump its also about blend, noise, checker etc. and none of those i can use if i am using linked material. So i have to know how to put in U and V or creating it.
2: what u or v have you putted in for that plain vray material?
3: i have ment that displacement is not working and bump is. Why
theese things are not in the manual i have red it twice. It is the first place that
I am looking for the answers.
1 - bumps etc. can be applied to linked materials I used them on several of the materials in my render (Chaos: Industry-leading design and visualization software) These are all linked material except for the glass (vismat glass)
2 - on the plain vray material in the example, I used 0.5 for u and v (it is tricky to get the u and v right as several threads on this forum have discussed, thats why I have only used the linked materials - its easier that way)
3 - someone else will have to respond on displacement (I just use bumps!)
But the thing is, you are using only the linked material and the bump, but
i would like to understand or to know how to use things in the difuse M box which
i cant use when i use linked material. Realy no offence. If it does not work properly
,would be eough to say from moderators or somebody who knows that it is not working and I will not waste any more time with it, and wait until it will be solved out.
So realy please moderators help us (i have noticed that i am not only one who is asking
about for example displacement) we apreciate it very much.
martin
PS I am using sketch up since its V3 and the vray is one of the best things which
came to its way. It is great plug in and i admire yours work. I am just realy
curios.
Minimar,
I understand your concerns, since I also struggle with it.
Basically you want to assign a pre-made .vismat to your objects right?
I would expect the following workflow:
1. Assigning (and positioning) the same texture to the Sketchup material as the diffuse texture of that future vismat you will import. In this way it should preserve the texture coordinates and scale (uvmappings)
2.In the Vray material list I would expect to see automatically the corresponding vray material using that same texture in the diffuse slot.
3.Clicking that Vray material and importing the vismat material.
4. DONE.
However,
It doesn’t work like that :-[
I don’t understand why the Sketchup materials aren’t automatically converted to the Vray material list.
Instead, this all has to be done manually, selecting each and every SU material seperately and then make a vraylinked material for each of them. If you have a SU material list containg dozens of materials, this can be a tedious job.
It kind of spoils the joy of using VfSU.
I brought this matter to the ASGVIS team before in beta period.
As I understand they will revise some things in the workflow department now the product is fully finished.
Right now you have 2 options for creating your UV information. The first - and generally easier to work with - is to apply a texture in SketchUp to a face. Sketchup only generates uv information if a texture is applied to the object. Otherwise the uv information is just trash values.
Your second option is to use one of our planar uvw generators. You can choose these from the texture editor. By default the uvw generator is set to “Explicit map channel”. That is the one you use if you are relying on SketchUp faces for uvw information. But you can change that to use planar uvw.
The reason I believe everyone here is suggesting to use linked materials is because that way you can apply a texture to the sketchup face with a sketchup material and then just link to that material. Then the uv info is coming from Sketchup and is easier to manipulate by using Sketchup’s uv tools.
3: i have ment that displacement is not working and bump is. Why
Someone else has brought this up - I was under the impression it was working, but I’ll look into it.
Here are my suggestions for your concerns. The thing about a linked material all it does is reference that Sketchup material for that specific layer. However, this doesn’t prevent you from adding any additional layers to the material. So I would suggest that you create a linked material, but simply add a layer on top of the linked layer to put whatever else you want on your material (noise, checkers, blends, or what have you). That way you can use sketchup to create the UV information (as everyone on this thread has been saying) and still use the textures that you want to use.
As for displacement, it is working. The multiplier for displacement will reference your scene units, so that may wind up being a bit to small to really notice. You can try increasing either the texture multiplier of the displacement map, or under V-ray options go to Displacement and increase the Amount.
guys i have still no luck not at all with displacement
my geometry is 1m x 1m plane
i have created linked material, bump has worked (multiplier 10) then i have switched off.
Then i have putted tahe same texture as a displacemnt map with multiplier 1000
displacement settings:
edge length…100
max subdivisions…256
amount 1000
I think the numbers are enough big to notice any difference on trh render, but there is none. What posibly can be the problem please.
Minimar
I spent hours yesterday carrying out an almost identical experiment and I also tried various standard visopt settings - with the same negative results. It is really frustrating!
Bump works, displacement doesn’t.
Damien
As you seem to be one of the few people to have displacement working, is there any chance of you posting a working example with its settings. At least that way we have a starting point.
Well, the issue at the heart of this whole discussion is material UVs. Basically without them, doing anything other than a material of a solid color is very hard. So even if what your doing has nothing to do with colors, but still needs to reference UV information, then a linked material is really the best way to go. So when I did my displacement experiment, I created a linked material from a bogus SU material (of course it didn’t really matter what the material was), put a simple gray diffuse layer over the linked layer (for simplicities sake and to see the displaced effect better), and was able to use a map for displacement. When I originally added the displacement, the rendered result with displacement was nearly indistinguishable from the one with out, except for right at the edges. So I increased the actual depth of the displacement by increasing the texture multiplier (in my case this went from 1 to 10). This may be the issue that all of you might be having, that the actual distance of the displacement is not showing up in the rendered result. The actual distance of the displacement depends on 3 things; scene units, displacement amount (in the displacement rollout of v-ray options), and the texture multiplier of the the displaced texture (or procedural map). By default the displacement amount is set to one and the texture multiplier is 1, so that will lead to a displacement that is equal to one scene unit. If you change your scene units then you effectively change the amount of displacement. If your scene units are very small, like inches or millimeters, then the default displacement value may not be noticeable for an object like a large wall.
Boy, this is hard work! OK, here we go. Here is just one screenshot showing the settings and the outcome from the experiments.
-regular texture from sketchup (which works with a the bump map)
-overlayed with a plain vray texture
-scene units 1mm
-displacement map is the same as the on ethat works as a bump map
-displacement ‘amount’ - tried 1 - 10000
-texture multiplier - tried 1 - 10000
The ‘overlaying’ with an extra vraymaterial on top of the linked material is kind of tedius don’t you think? Seems like one step too many to obtain something that could be a lot simpler if the linking of SU materials would be somehow revised and made more powerful (= automated, preserving Sketchup uv-mapping on textures in added layers, ability to import vismats while preserving the assigned SU uv-mappings, etc…
In 99% of the cases for making a material , my workflow would involve linking a Sketchup material as this is the only way to have the Sketchup textures positioned and scaled just as I would want them.
You guys have the most powerful render engine on the market.
The ‘carbon copy’ porting of Vray from 3dsMax to Sketchup is successfull resulting in a very solid software package.
I think now it’s time to focus on optimising the workflow towards faster use in Sketchup.
The sole reason I personnaly didn’t buy Vray for Sketchup yet is because I would loose too much time in the material setup phase. I will definitely jump on the train when things would be improved in that area…
@David
I think there might be one overlooked issue. In your displacement settings, you have your edge length set to 1 px which may be at the root of the issue. Basically have that set to 1 is that the edge of one displaced triangle can’t be longer than one pixel which is very, very small. Subsequently because of that (and SU’s tendency to have very few original triangles) there may not actually be enough subdivisions to recreate the displaced mesh (eventhough 512 is a lot of subdivisions). You can try setting your Edge length to something like 6 or something, and that might take care of it.
Also, try disabling relative to BBox. I tried finding more information on it, but nothing really out there. Its off by default, so that would be my recommendation. After those two things I’m absolutely stumped.
@Biebel
I completely understand what your saying. Unfortunately we are at the mercy of SketchUp on this one because of how the program as a whole does things. We need to find some way to get around this and allow material creation to be a much more streamlined process. Its hard because this is possibly one of the most heavily tied components to SketchUp so our processes have to work hand in hand with SketchUp, and right now its not working as well as it should. Workflow, UI, and optimization are on our list of issues to work on, so we’re in the process of finding a better solution.
