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VRAY - Huge Material Problem!


Flosimo

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I could not find a way to make textures from an external vray material file appear in the shaded view of formz (use vray material file) only the materials that came with the plugin have a low res texture representation. I treid to scale down the textures from 8K to 1K but it doesnt help. That makes it impossible to map self created vray materials in formz since you simply dont see the texture. I think this is an essential functionality to use vray in a professional way and also to sell this plugin for reasonable money. I love formz and vray but i dont want to pay for a faulty product. Did someone experienced the same problem or am i doing something wrong here?

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This is still a work in progress application. For whatever reason I sometimes have the same problem. (v-ray textures not showing up in shaded view).  The other issue is textures not previewing in my material palette which makes it especially difficult to find a material if you have dozens of them in your project.  (Tech can you hear us?).  If you have been poking around for solutions in the forum you will see that I have posted a go to fix for all things V-ray related several times.  Throw out your preference folder and let the program rebuild it upon restart.  Somehow this debugs the material issues for a little while.  See if this helps. 

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Yes this is a bug, Shaded view is used for FormZs interactive texture mapping technique, and it currently is not correctly reading all  vrmat files. 

For now to work around it, you can load the texture map file into the Shaded material type (switch from Vray type at top right of material parameters).  Now you can accurately map the object.  When you are ready to render with Vray, just change back to the Vray material type and load your vrmat file.  

An alternate method is to stick with the generic Vray material type that is customizable in FormZ without needing the separate material editor.  That is working well and automatically translates to the Shaded renderer for mapping.

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I tried your go to fix Andrew but it does not work for this specific problem. In my opinion formz should solve those issues before they sell the plugin to customers. When using the generic vray material inside formz with hires textures, the formz file gets ridiculously big and the material editor slows down so much that it is not useable anymore. I think thats because formz decompresses (for example jpeg) textures to their uncompressed file size. For example: A 2,5 mb jpeg texture can translate to 20 mb when uncompressed... If you have 4 textures in your material (Color, Reflection, Glossiness, Bump) you end up with a increased file size of approx. 80 mb for one material only!!! So i think that is not an option if you want to build a scene for e.g. interiour rendering with lots of textures since the file size will just get to big. To sum things up, i think the plugin is not really ready for a fluid and professional workflow. I hope that the guys at formz will manage to fix those isssues since i would LOVE to do modeling AND rendering inside formz. For now i will keep using blender and cycles for the visualization part...

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I agree Flosimo, there are things that need to be addressed for a better 'out of the box' experience.  There are simply too many default options that need to be changed to get a good workflow with FormZ in my opinion.  Everything from the horrible beige background, to the cartoonishly oversized icons, and the unorganized palettes.  There are also a lot of settings hidden under Edit>Prefrerences, that should be changed.   One big one that you are having issues with is under Project Files > KEEP TEXTURES option that is stupidly turned ON by default.  Turn this OFF, and make sure Compression is OFF.   Then once you have your file open, goto File>Project Settings> Project Files.  Here you can double check that your file has Keep Textures turned OFF as well, and that the Slider for File Optimization is all the way left on Open Fast.  These changes should fix some of your built in material editor troubles.  

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FZnoob,  just FYI, RenderZone is a plugin as well.  A really well integrated one, but a plugin nonetheless.  I'd really like to see the same VRay interface that SketchUp, Rhino, Maya, etc all get here in FormZ.  But since AutodesSys is handling the development for Vray for FormZ, and not Chaos Group directly, I think we have to compromise.  Given the amount of work to get it to this point, I am impressed especially given how small our FormZ user base must be compared to those other giants.  

Future FZ improvements should address this adoption issue I hope.

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I know that RZ is a plugin, that's why it has to be registered separately.

My point is, given that FZ is a small  company with very limited $$ for development, I hope than other improvements don't come via a plug-ins

rather than integrated. I have requested a symmetry tool and someone else suggested a plugin. I don't want yet another license to buy and keep up with.

 

 

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On 1/6/2019 at 2:27 PM, Justin Montoya said:

I agree Flosimo, there are things that need to be addressed for a better 'out of the box' experience.

I do think it's a fair point, though, that if they're going to be selling Vray to customers, they needed to work some of these issues out before commercial release.  It's kind of unfair to expect customers to constantly reset their prefs, etc. just to keep material previews working, and other such workarounds, for what is fairly important functionality by any rational standard (and a significant workflow hit when not working).  Having reliable in-view preview of materials, as well as previews in the materials panel aren't "luxury features", they're necessities.

I've got Vray licenses on Modo and Cinema4D already, and would really prefer to use Vray on formZ as well, for material library reuse benefits among others, but the kinds and frequencies of problems being reported here give me serious concerns about whether it's really at a "production-reliable" level of quality.

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I bit unrelated to your topic, but I wonder if anyone has used mirror as a v-ray material. There's no preset now for this material, and so far I've used polished chrome, but its reflections get a little blurry. Has anyone created a mirror material who could help me out?

Thanks,

Allan.

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  • 1 month later...

Hi Folks. I'm giving the vRay plugin another try. Can anyone give us all the cliff notes on what material formats can be referenced from downloads etc. what I've figured out so far is vrscans are not compatible yet because the plugin isn't for formZ. Ive tried to load vismat files at the vray level in the formZ material editor but no luck.

Are all vzmat files from elsewhere loadable into formZ? Are any vismat?  How is one to know when looking for materials outside of the formZ plugin provided materials?

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 year later...

You can change the extension from  .vismat to .vrmat and they'll open in formZ.... If the file contains functions that are available in SketchUp or Rhino but not in FormZ, the file will still open, but without those functions.... generally they work fine.... I've noticed that if you open and save in FormZ they respond better (not so many issues of invisible previews and flickering windows... once saved, the textures are saved to a 'maps' folder by default...so if the original textures were loose; you'll get a double up of textures, you can delete the loose textures.

https://vismats.com/materials.html

http://www.cadnav.com/vray-materials/

http://sketchupvraymaterials.blogspot.com/

https://www.sketchuptexture.com/search/label/VISMAT VRAY SKETCHUP

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  • 4 months later...

Update time.   We finally tracked down the issue at the beginning of this post.  There has always been some issue with materials not previewing in the palette or materials not showing properly on the model.  Or in my case lots of missing textures upon render.  The FIX:  You must have KEEP TEXTURES turned on in project settings.  Then you must turn on Opens Fast or your save times will be really long.  

It was such a simple thing that ended up causing a lot of issues.  

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