VRay for SketchUp New Features Guide

Materials Arrangement: This new build allows you to move and arrange the materials in any order by dragging and dropping the material in your desired position on the V-Ray Material Editor.

How to use Material Arrangement:
Select the material and move it to the new position.

Layer Arrangement: Now you can arrange the material layer to any position, allowing you to create a variation of effects that were very difficult to create with the old version. You can place the reflection layer on top of the emissive layer to create a reflective light bulb material.

Material Preview: We improved our material editor to include a preview of the material that looks as close as possible to the final render.

Green Glass

Gold

Layer Preview: It is now possible to make a preview of every single layer in your material to see how this layer affects the final result.
Below is an example of the Layer Preview. The material has four layers: two diffuse layers and two reflection layers.

Material Editor

Render Sample

Alpha Transparency: This new build supports direct alpha transparency on the material.

Use Color Texture for Transparency: This option allows you to activate the alpha transparency directly on the material. V-Ray only supports .png , .tiff and native SketchUp transparency materials.

How to use Color Texture for Transparency:
Go to the V-Ray material Editor and select the material that you want to apply transparency. In the Diffuse Layer, enable the option "Use color texture for transparency". Remember that the images should be transparency .png or .tiff or native SketchUp transparencies.

Render Without Transparency

Render With Transparency

Displacement Per Material: You have the ability to change the displacement parameters in every material in your scene. If you have geometry that’s far away from the camera, you can reduce the displacement quality to that geometry and speed up your render. These options are located on the V-Ray Material Editor under the Map rollout.

Keep Continuity: Using continuity will produce a connected surface, without splits.

Keep Continuity On

Keep Continuity Off

View Dependent: When this is on, edge length determines the maximum length of a sub-triangle edge in pixels. A value of 1.0 means that the longest edge of each sub-triangle will be about one pixel long when projected on the screen. When View Dependent is off, edge length is the maximum sub-triangle edge length in world units.

Shift: This option shifts the displaced surface up and down along the normals. This can be either positive or negative.

Left Shift = 10, Center Shift = 5, Right Shift = 0

Left Shift = -10, Center Shift = -5, Right Shift = 0
As you can see, if the values are negative you can shift the geometry under the floor.
This is not the same as "Cutoff".

Cutoff: This will clip the surface geometry in places where the displacement map value is below the specified threshold. This can be used for clip mapping a displacement map value, below which geometry will be clipped.

In this example the Cutoff = 0

This example demonstrates the use of cutoff to clip away geometry from an object.
In this example the Cutoff = .5

Max Subdivs: This controls the maximum sub-triangles generated from any triangle of the original mesh. The value is in fact the square root of the maximum number of sub-triangles. For example, a value of 256 means that at most, 256 x 256 = 65536 sub-triangles will be generated for any given original triangle. It is not a good idea to keep this value very high as it will significantly increase the render time.

Edge Length: This determines the quality of the displacement. Each triangle of the original mesh is subdivided into a number of sub-triangles. More sub-triangles mean more detail in the displacement, slower rendering times and more RAM usage. The meaning of edge length depends on the view-dependent parameter below.

This is an example of the global value of the displacement.
Notice that all geometries have the same quality.

The above example uses per material displacement.
Left Edge Length = 4, Center Edge Length = 2, Right Edge Length = 1.
Notice that all three geometries have a different quality.

Procedural Texture Mapping: V-Ray has fourteen new texture maps that allow you to create different effects on the material editor. You can use this new texture mapping in any layer to blend the mapping.

Dirt: This texture mapping type can be used to simulate dirt on objects, or to produce an ambient occlusion pass.

Black_Color: This is the color of the dirt or the occluded area. By default the color is Black. You can also use a texture mapping for this option.

White_Color: This is the color of the unoccluded area (areas without dirt). By default the color is white. You can also use texture mapping for these options.

Black Color = Default White Color = Brick Texture

Black Color = Red White Color = Brick Texture

Black Color = Grass Texture

Ignore For GI: When this option is enabled the dirt effect will be taken into consideration for GI calculations.

Consider Same Object Only: When on, the dirt will affect only the objects themselves, without including contact surfaces and edges. If off, the entire scene geometry is participating for the final result.

Consider Same Object Only Off

Consider Same Object Only On

Invert Normal: This option allows you to invert the dirt with respect to surface normals.

Invert Normal Disable

Invert Normal Enable

Falloff: This parameter controls the speed of the transition between the areas with dirt and the areas without dirt.

Bias X , Y, Z: These parameters will bias the normals to the X (Y, Z) axes, so that the dirt effect is forced to those directions. These parameters can also be negative values for inversing the direction of the dirt.

Radius = 5

Radius = 10

Radius = 20

Distribution: This parameter will force the rays to gather closer to the surface normal. The effect is that the dirt area is being narrowed closer to the contact edges. For ambient occlusion, set this parameter to 1.0 to get distribution similar to the ambient lighting on a diffuse surface.

Subdivs: Controls the number of samples that V-Ray takes to calculate the dirt effect. Lower values render faster but produce a more noisy result.

Subdivs = 2

Subdivs = 8

Subdivs = 16

In addition to the Dirt material, V-Ray for SketchUp has other procedure mapping that you can combine to create different effects. Below is a list with the other texture mappings.

Table of Contents

Rendering by Dario Dubinsky

V-Ray 1.6 for SketchUp is a massive upgrade to V-Ray for SketchUp which includes a series of new feature introductions that enhance visualization workflow and render quality such as V-Ray RT, V-Ray Dome Light and streamlining scene complexity with V-Ray Proxy.

Rendering by Dario Dubinsky

Click here for more information