Mini the making of H Hauz by J Trenonce

Here is the Mini-the-Making (MTM) tutorial of Jephte Trenonce wiht his winning entry in our recent VRAY Sketchup 1.6 Beta rendering challenge.



Due to copyrights reserve, the slides pdf is not downloadable.

New Vray Sketchup 1.6 Video Tutorials

Here are some of the video tutorials for the new beta Vray SketchUp 1.6 VRAY Dome Light VRAY Proxy VRAY RT (Real Time)

Water pool and Caustics Tutorial

First of all big thanks to Deo Saputra for sharing to us the materials on this tutorial.There are very few tutorials when it comes to caustics and we believe you will really get from this one.. Enjoy reading it.






1. important Set Up Global Illumination Environment: Use Text Sky Map with the following settings




Photon Radius: Used to control the caustics' radius. This value depends on the size of the scene.
Caustics Subdivision: This parameter controls the amount of photons that VRAY traces to estimate caustics. Large numbers means better quality but more memory needed, thus slowing down the calculation process.




2. Caustics Parameters




Maximum Photons: This is the maximum number of photons that will be considered when rendering the caustics effect on a surface. Smaller values cause less photons to be used and the caustics will be sharper, but perhaps noisier. Larger values produce smoother, but blurrier caustics. The special value of 0 means that V-Ray will use all the photons that it can find inside the search area.
Multiplier: this allows you to control the brightness of the photon map
Search distance. It allows you to specify the photon search distance manually. * Keep in mind that this value depends on the size of your scene. Lower values will speed up the rendering but may produce more noisy results. Larger values will slow down the rendering but may produce smoother results.

3. The Water Material

Reflection Layer



IOR value



Diffuse Layer



Refraction Layer



Fog Color



Displacement Map



You can download the Vismat together with the Texture HERE

Vray Options











Here is the Final Render using the material.

Tip:  Be sure that the face of the water is not negative face. You might also want to apply the material on both side of your water surface.

Tutorial: Adding color to Native SU texture in Vray SketchUp

Introduction: The way Sketchup edits the color of its native texture and the way VRAY SU work is different. Editing the color of the native SU material inside SU does not guarantee that VRAY SU recognizes it. VRAY SU will still use the original bitmap material use by SketchUp.

Here is an explanation from Onel Pabico on workaround how you want to do it in VRAY SU.

Tutorial: Modeling simple drainage

Here is a simple modeling simple drainage tutorial from Chen Menes. Thanks Chen for this one.

Tutorial: UV Mapping using UV tools for Sketchup and Road Kill

This a tutorial from Edgar Navas 'rodrigonotor"

First download UVTools from Sketchucation. Also download RoadKill
If your Antivirus detected  the second file as malicious file, do not worry.

The image below is always the result of jumbled mapping in SU irregular surface most of the times.

Select the whole surface

In the menu->Plugins->UVTools->Export UVs to OBJ

It is very important to remember where the file is being save.

Open Roadkill and load the file

 In RoadKIll:
ALT+Click Izq= Rotate
ALT+Click Medio=Pan
ALT+Click Derecho= Zoom

Click letter "E" to selection mode

Using the crossing window selection, select the surface, then adjust the mapping.

With the selection click letter "W" to join all surfaces

Save (in RoadKill) with same name and place, back to Sketchup. In Sketchup go to menu->Plugin->UVTools->Import UVs from OBJ

Import the UV and voila we have correct mapping.

Vray Sun Tutorial in Vray SketchUp

Here is a basic tutorial by Nunung Adiwijaya with VRAY SketchUp Sun. This is very simple yet very informative especially for those who are new with VRAY SU. Thanks to Nunung with this tutorial.