Tips and Tricks Series No.4

How to create Vray light components.

I have seen many times, there are several VFSU users who edit their lights one by one. Why not create components to that when you edit one light all the lights will be edited at the same time. How to do it? Here it a simple tip.

Step 1: Create a receptacle and make it into component.

Step 2:  Type the name of this component. (say ies)

Step 3: Open the component/group

Step 4: Place the IES light inside the component and close it.

Step 5: Copy the component

Step 6: Edit the IES light inside the component. 
Notice all the ies light icon were selected at once. When you edit one of the lights the other lights will be edited too.

MTM Series 2012 #29: Nostalgic Patio by Juan Antonio Medina

Here is our 29th Entry on the 29th of February...A special MTM from Juan Antonio Medina. In this MTM, Juan Antonio focused in sharing his knowledge with texturing.

Welcome to SVR Mr. Johnson's class

Welcome to SVR. Today you will learned how to create prisms and Cylinders using GoogleSketchUp.

Mr. Nomer

Tips and Tricks Series 3: Tilting the camera

Here is a simple trick which I know sometimes we don't see as useful. But for me its a good compositional trick. Tilting the camera.

To do this you need to hold the middle of the mouse and hold CTRL key of your keyboard at the same time; while holding both drag your mouse. Observe the rotation is different from orbit when you just hold the middle key of your mouse. This time you can make the camera tilting from left to right.

Tips and Tricks Series 2: How to speed up SketchUp by Zernan Suarez

Here's a tip on how to speed-up SketchUp when working with big scale models.

Download PDF HERE

Advanced VFSU Tutorial Series 2: Masking

I don't know how many of you have read my previous tutorial:  Basic Vray Sketchup Tutorial Series No.3. In this tutorial, one of my main emphasis is knowledge with layering. My hope in this tutorial is you will have a good ground and good grip with VRAY material's layers.

As I have explained in this tutorial, these layers could be stacked together and the layer placements can have an impact to the material properties. This will be an advantage to those of you who use Photoshop or Gimp. Let me take this further to our next Advanced tutorial series. Let's start!

Step 1: Set-up
Let me use this mirror in my Basic Vray SketchUp Series.

Step 2: Create/rename VRAY Material

Select the Mirror material and go to Vray Material editor, rename your Vray Material.

Step 3: Create Reflection Layer

When you created reflection layer, VRAY will stack it on top of your Diffuse Layer. Notice also that the Reflection layer has no Map applied, therefore this is a perfect mirror material wit 100%reflective property.

Here is the render. The mirror material is showing.

But now I want to achieve this type of material,  I want the reflection to happen, but at the same time I need to put the dust, scratches, letters etc.

Step 4: Creating the Dust, scratch material in Photoshop (mask map)


I would like to thank Zernan Suarez aka Zdesign for this beautiful material which you can download HERE.

I will use this initial texture material and re-do it in Photoshop.

Here I loaded the material in Photoshop

Double click the Background in the Layer window tab and convert it to Layer 0 (or rename it to whatever name you like). Create a new layer (with transparent BG and place it below Layer 0

Go to Layer 0 and select color range (you can also use the magic wand). Select the white area and click OK.

Here is the selected layer.

Press the DELETE button to delete the white areas. See the result below.

Now use grunge brushes, scratch brushes..You can download a lot of these brushes HERE or any other Photoshop brushes sites. I choose this Grunge spatter brush and loaded them in my Photoshop brushes  root folder.

Use these brushes with low opacity and paint whatever effect you want.

Here is my finished one. In this screen grab I put white Background to see the effect better. When you save this material be sure to remove the white background. I also re-sized the material for a better ratio with my mirror material in SketchUp. Be sure to save in PNG (to support transparency). You can also download the file below, this is the same map I used on this tutorial.

Step 5: Creating Second Diffuse material

At the moment you have these stack.. The reflection material over the diffuse material.

Now let us create another diffuse layer.

Rename this layer as Mask Map

Now Here is your current stack.

Step 5: Mask Layer as top Layer

Move the Mask layer (the second diffuse material) on top of the Reflection Layer.

Step 6: Load the created Mask Map to the Bitmap box.

1. Mask Layer (2nd diffuse map renamed as Mask map)
2. Click "m" to load Map
3. Select TexBitmap
4. Load the Png file that was created.

Step 7: Use color texture as transparency

Now this is the most important in this mask layer. Tick color texture as transparency.

Back to SketchUp interface. Here how the map has been applied.

Step 8: Reposition the Pins
 
Now let us reposition the pins of the texture

.

Here is the render. The texture map on top of the reflection layer. With this workflow, I think it will open up with many possibilities when it comes to using masking... You can even put as many stacks of Diffuse layer as you want...I hope many of you will try to help me in exploring these possibilities.

The good thing with SketchUp, you can always edit this texture, by clicking the orange arrow on the right of texture image material.

Here I tried to re-edit my map.

Once saved, the image will be automatically updated.

Here is the render Image

This is the same technique I did with this one..

Here I also use the same technique on top of the Emissive layer