News: Chaos Group Released VRAY 2.0 for SketchUp

 Chaos Group Ships V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp

25 New Features Target Speed, Lighting and Visualization Quality; 64-Bit Rendering, V-Ray RT for CPU and GPU, Plus Support for SketchUp 2013 Now Available

Sofia, Bulgaria – 16 September 2013 – With today’s launch of Chaos Group’s V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp, the access designers have to faster rendering, better lighting tools, and more detail in complex scenes has reached new heights. It’s the biggest expansion to V-Ray for SketchUp’s rendering capabilities yet, and it’s all thanks to the help of a vast and very dedicated group of beta testers.

This artist-friendly rendering solution for SketchUp features dramatic improvements to visualization workflow (V-Ray RT®), image-based lighting quality (V-Ray Dome Light), and a designer’s ability to quickly manage complex scenes with highly detailed models (V-Ray Proxy).

“This is by far the most exciting and influential release of V-Ray for SketchUp we have ever had. High quality visualization is now easier than ever, making V-Ray even more of an everyday tool for designers", said Corey Rubadue, Product Manager at Chaos Group.

“V-Ray is the best rendering engine for SketchUp on the market today,” said Matthew Valero, Founder at Valero Studio. “High polygon proxies, RT rendering, and incredible accuracy at rapid speeds - simply amazing. It’s the one SketchUp plug-in I could never live without.”

Since they were first revealed in beta form, V-Ray 1.6 for SketchUp’s banner features were met with much excitement in the V-Ray community. After receiving excellent feedback from beta testers, Chaos Group was able to turn what was initially supposed to be an incremental release into a major one.

The introduction of GPU support for V-Ray RT provides faster rendering and real time interactions with speed improvements up to 30 times faster. With 64-bit rendering, 3D artists can tap their 64-bit render farm for more processing power with added flexibility to render larger scene sizes, images, and animations in SketchUp. The ability to produce animation for SketchUp projects has also been streamlined, ensuring a cleaner and easier creation process.

For the full list of features, click here.

"We use V-Ray for SketchUp as a base for every illustration that leaves this studio," said Jeremy Kay, Owner at StudioJDK. “Its remarkably fast rendering speeds, customization abilities and beautiful output never let you down or doubt why it’s our industry’s leading rendering software solution.”

Chaos Group has also prepared a long list of dedicated resources that will help new V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp users. Those materials include: help documentation, a dedicated forum, and a dedicated product page.

Pricing and Availability

V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp is now available for SketchUp 8, SketchUp Make 2013 and SketchUp Pro 2013 on both Windows and OS X platforms. To provide optimum security, reliability, and portability Chaos Group requires a hardware key to license its software. V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp customers will have the option to purchase a new hardware key or install the license on an existing one. Registered users have access to a free demo through the V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp product page.

Pricing for V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp will remain unchanged at $800. The upgrade price from V-Ray 1.49 for SketchUp or lower is $320. Users who purchased V-Ray for SketchUp between 15 April 2013 and 16 September 2013 will be eligible for a free upgrade.

V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp can be purchased through Chaos Group’s local resellers.

I will be reviewing this Software soon..

Nomer Adona

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.

VRAY Sketchup Beta 1.6 Rendering Challenge Winners

SketchUp Vray Resources, Sketchup Vray Artists Facebook Group, and SketchUp Texture would like to thank all the participants in this particular challenge. A big thank you to Chaos Group for sponsoring three licenses to out top three winners. Finally, we would like to thank Fernando Rentas of Chaos Group, Pete Stopple of Solo place and Sketchucation.com, Onel Pabico of SketchUp VRAY Artists, Rosanna Mataloni of SketchUp Texture, Nomer Adona of SketchUp VRAY Resources and Arch. Omar Estevez as our jurors for this challenge.


The winners for this rendering challenge are:

First Place: Jephte Tongco Trenonce

Second Place: Dhavid Ben Amora Trinidad

Third Place: Jonathan Mission Taculod

We would like to special mention entries who are in the top 10: Syafizzal Shahruddin, Luis Carlos Mendez Roa, Suresh Tamang , Zernan Suarez, Luis Carlos Mendez Roa, Tyrone Diesca and Roquemar Beltran.

Understanding the Multi-sub material in VRAY PROXY

I am still in the process of writing our next tutorials with VRAYSU 1.6 Here is one of them. Multi Sub Material

VRAYSU1.6 BEta Challenge Entries

Here is the album of all the VRAYSU1.6 Beta Challenge Entries.

Grass workflow and VRAY Proxy by David Brufau

This latest tutorial comes from David Brufau aka dBrenders. In this tutorial David shows his workflow from modeling, texturing and scattering using SketchUp. Finally using the latest VRay Beta 1.6, David shows the power of the new proxy feature.

Su proxy grass by David Brufau from Nomer Adona

Here is the diffuse texture

You can also download the following files courtesy of David Brufau.

VRAY Mesh simple
Vray Mesh complex
SketchUp File, use the latest SketchUp Version

VRAY FOR SKETCHUP BETA 1.6 Rendering Challenge

Rendering Challenge

This is a new rendering challenge using VRAY for SketchUp Beta 1.6. In this challenge you will explore the new features of VRAY SketchUp Beta 1.6 such as proxy, dome light, lens flare, use of new shaders and procedural textures, RT etc. You will attach work in progress (WIP) screen grabs together with your final rendering entry.

There is no specified scene in this rendering challenge, because you can send any render scene using VFSU Beta 1.6. This challenge will run from 9th of June and will end on the 15th of July 2013. SVA, ST and SVR administration will select 10 best entries and the 10 best entries with most likes in the SVA FOLDER,  SketchUp Texture FOLDER and 3D Challenge FOLDER consecutively will automatically qualified in the final 30 entries. These final 30 entries will be judged by prestigious juries and will select and declare the top three winning entries using the below criteria. 

 

The criteria for judging includes:

Rendering scene realism......................................................30%

Use of new features of VRAY SketchUp Beta 1.6...............20%

Creativity.............................................................................20%  

Complexity of the Scene......................................................20%

Overall Impact....................................................................10%

Where to download the Beta

Download the VRAY for SketchUp Beta 1.6 HERE

PRIZE:

The three top images will receive VRAY SketchUP 1.6 License courtesy of CHAOS GROUP.

Conditions:

Upon joining this challenge, you agree that your rendering scene might be use by SVR and Chaos Group for marketing purposes. The top three winners will also create Mini the Making tutorial showing scene set up, sample materials, how the new feature of VRAY SketchUp Beta 1.6 were used, rendering options and post processing if any. 

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)

Press Release from Chaos Group.. The New Open Beta VRAY SketchUp 1.6

V ray for-sketchup_1.6_open_beta.doc from Nomer Adona

MTM Elder Cavalcantti's Sushi Bar

Thanks Elder for this Sushi Bar "Mini the Making".

Due to copyright issues, Elder requested the downloading of the PDF be disabled.

MTM Here

Mtm elder cavalcantti2 from Nomer Adona

MTM Series 2013 No.1 Night Scene of Simple House

Here is our first MTM entry this year 2013 coming from Mark Anthony Muncada. Thank you Anthony for this one.

Visopt Series 2013_Natz Arguellez

The level of contrast in the exterior is excellent in this visopt by Natz Arguellez. Donwload it HERE.

Thank You Natz for providing us this visopt.

Visopt Series by Leo Valenzuela

Here is our next Visopt courtesy of Leo Valenzuela. Download it HERE.

SVA-SVR Rendering Challenge

Here is our first rendering challenge for 2013. The model is modeled by Wisam Ghannoum. Thanks Wissam for this model. Download this model HERE.

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.

How to Series No.3_ Loading and Packing Vismats

Here is my How to series entry No.3 which will show how to pack and load the vismat file. Vismat is the root file use by VRAY SketchUp with materials.

Part 1: Packing the Vismat material.

Packing is the word use when you want to save the vismat file and want to share it with others or just for reusing it in the other files. Here is how... Let me share you this mug scene in SketchUp.  In this scene I created three different materials and they are already applied in the mugs. The materials are the same materials on the rendered image above.
 


To pack the material, all you have to do is to open the material editor. Select the VRAY Material. In the image below the "Metal Flake" material was selected.



Then right click mouse. Select "Pack Material"



Now you can specify the name and file type. I love to zip it when I am sharing it with others. 



Here is the Zip File it has two files: the vismat and the texture I used in the file.



Part 2: Loading the Vismat File.

This is pretty easy. All you have to do is to go to the material editor, right click mouse and choose load material.

 Browse the location of the material you want to load. Click Open.



The material will be added to your material editor and usually it will appear at the bottom.



You can apply now this material to the scene. One piece of advise, use the SketchUp Paint bucket tool to apply this material. It is faster..

One of the good thing to know is that once the material is chosen in the material editor, this material is automatically chosen in SketchUp too. Therefore you can use the paint bucket tool with ease.


DO NOT USE the apply material selection tool in VRAY it's very slow comparing to the paint bucket tool in SketchUp.



Here the material is applied to the selection using the paint bucket tool.