We hope this puts a little light in your life!
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
New Lights!
Well, we've said "We don't plan on adding any new features" time and time again... but that doesn't mean a few features didn't creep in when we weren't looking. Thanks to our new plugin core, we were able to add Spot and IES lights without breaking a sweat!
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
V-Ray for SketchUp for Mac - Test Renders
As we mentioned in our previous post, we have asked some of our users that are testing our latest WIP version of V-Ray for SketchUp, to send us some renders of what they have been able to do so far with the product. Some of these renders are from some older builds, so even without a polished UI, and complete functionality, our users were able to kick these renders out!
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Edit: The following images were posted 11/4/2009
We'll post more images when we get some more submissions. We just thought we'd share what we had so far.
Friday, August 28, 2009
V-Ray for Sketchup: smaller, faster... more complete
Come one, come all, and gather 'round! We're going to take a quick break from development to give you all a quick update. We have recieved an enormous response from the public so far, it seems like everyone and their immediate family wants a shiny, new and improved V-Ray for Sketchup. We aren't surprised though, V-Ray + Mac is a very exciting pair!
It's been a while since we've given you a peek in to what has been going on with V-Ray for Sketchup. When we last left off, we had just gotten the various editors up and running, some basic material stuff was in place, and we were starting to tackle some of the more visible things that users interact with, rather than the scary dark magic that we use behind the scenes.
So what's new, how's it going, and can I play with it yet? These are the most common questions we've been getting these days. To be honest, we've been in crunch mode for a while now, trying to get this product out the door as soon as we can. It's been hard to keep track of all the latest changes, so we'll do our best to highlight the big ones.
-The first update to mention, is the V-Ray Frame Buffer. It took a while to get the VFB to show up on the Mac, we had to change a few things around, but by golly, we got it in there. This was the main V-Ray UI component that was missing from our WIP build. So now we have the Options, Material, Texture, and Light editor windows, as well as the frame buffer.
-In addition to the default V-Ray layered material that we had in the last update, we now have a couple other material types. We have the 2Sided and Skp2Sided materials in our product now, as well as the V-Ray Toon material. In other material news, we have also added some additional controls for displacement (cutoff makes some pretty interesting results).
-We have added volume fog and displacement support.
-We can set textures for our materials now.
-We've added support for the Physical Sun.
-We've added support for animation. We've also added support for billboards in animation (so far the billboard has to be outside of a group/component in order for it to work properly).
-We've added native support for SketchUp imported Images.
-We can load our old scenes, materials, and options now.
-We've updated our Licensing dialogs, and also made a couple changes to the way our licensing works.
-Our UI has been getting updated little by little. Controls are being grouped in a logical order, default values, min/max values, and helper controls have been getting added.
-We have a couple new features that we've thrown in. We've added Ambient Occlusion to our GI settings. We also allow the Physical Camera to have it's type changed, so you can create a Spherical, Cylindrical, Fish Eye, Box, or Warped Spherical Physical Camera render now.
The only major hurdles we're still working to get over are Material and Texture previews, UVW controls, some adjustments to our licensing, and the render progress bar. Then we just have to worry about fixing any bugs that our test users come up with, and finally apply a little polish to the product. So all in all, our current work in progress build is coming along quite well. We've asked some of our test users to provide us with some example renders to show what you can achieve with our latest version, so hopefully our next update will give us a chance to show off our work.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Measure twice, cut once, and then test 50 times...
Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, geeks and nerds, gather 'round. V-Ray for SketchUp's latest round of development is about to enter it's final stage. Although we're not entirely done just yet, a fair amount of functionality and features have been implemented, there is still a bit of fine tuning and polish to be done. Another crucial task has yet to be checked off our todo list as well, testing. Sure we've tested the product a good bit on our own... but we're developers, not artists, architects, product designers, etc. So as a result, our tests are usually one of the following:
- A plane
- A box
- A mess
(That's an example of a mess, in case you were curious)
So instead of leaving the crucial task of verifying that our product functions properly, in the hands of developers, we thought we'd see if some of our customers would like to give our new build a spin instead. If you think you might be up to the challenge, drop by our sign up page here. We would like to let you know ahead of time... there's going to be bugs, that's why you're testing it. With any luck, everyone will find those nasty little bugs and tell us about them so we can crush them with our mighty fists of justice!
Monday, June 29, 2009
Development Update! 06-29-2009
June is almost over, and there hasn't been a single developer blog post! Oh no! We've been rather busy around here lately, and since this blog is updated by the developers themselves, it can really only be updated when one of us gets a minute. We appreciate everyone's support and patience as we continue through this development cycle.
(On a side note, since I'm writing this blog entry from a PC, I will be showing screen shots from the PC version of our product. Since we are developing the PC and Mac version simultaneously, what you see on one platform, is identical to what you will see on the other. Everything except for the shape of various buttons and other system specific UI elements anyway. I promise that you're not missing anything.)
So what has changed since the last update? Where should we begin...
In our last update, the only editor that we had working 100% was the material editor. We now have an options editor, and a texture editor in place, and fully functional. This is a big step forward, and a very important step in regards to testing our product, and calibrating various defaults and parameters. These editors still need a little polish, at the moment there are some controls that need to be grouped together in a more logical manner, and some of the labels for controls need to be renamed, but the functionality is there, and that's the main goal we were aiming for.
Options Editor
Texture Editor
There has been some work done to our material editor as well. For this release, we have been trying to mimic our existing product's UI as much as we can. This is being done mainly because our existing users know how to use this interface. Redesigning UI is no small task, and it needs to have a lot of preproduction done before we can start to venture off in that direction. There have been some small changes though, and we hope that they will be received with open arms by our users (especially since the changes were requested by users in the first place).
In the images from our last update, you may have noticed that the layers that were being created had some crazy looking names. Instead of Diffuse, it was a BRDFDiffuse layer. Our default material even looked a bit strange. That's because we were deriving names directly from the V-Ray plugins themselves. Also, the names reflected the internal representation of the material. So the diffuse layer in our default material was named “/DefaultMaterial/BRDFDiffuse”, and there was no way to rename the material without breaking the internal representation of the material. Now we have the standard 4 layers that everyone knows and loves, Emissive, Reflection, Diffuse, Refraction. Each layer can be renamed, as can the base material that contains all of these layers. This brought us to the same level of functionality that our old product had.
We have had a number of you (our users) contact us in the past, saying that the existing functionality of our “VRayMtl” was a bit limiting, and could use a little love. Among your suggestions, was the removal of the layer groups. In our old product, you would have to expand our Scene Materials menu, and then the layered material's menu, and then the individual layer groups before you could view the individual layers in a given layered material. That extra grouping of layers is really kind of useless, and beyond that, it constrains the drag and drop functionality to just being able to drag and drop within a particular layer group. So we have taken out the layer groups. We have also added drag and drop functionality in to our product, and yes, you are allowed to drag and drop a layer anywhere inside of a layered material! So if you've been dying to see what it would look like if you put an emissive layer under a refraction layer... go for it! Of course if you don't feel quite so adventurous, and don't want to go mucking around with the natural order of things, you can just create layers as you normally would, and a nice little algorithm will make sure that the layers are placed in the correct order for you. If you do happen to play around with the layer order, and then add a layer, it will try it's best to place the new layer in the right spot, but you'll probably have to help it out a little bit to make sure it's where you want it to be.
After Dragging and Dropping Layers =>
We have linked the SketchUp materials up to our V-Ray materials as we did in our old product. For each of our materials, there is a corresponding SketchUp material, and vice versa. We received a lot of positive feedback about having our materials set up this way, so we decided to keep it this way.
Now that we have a working texture editor, we have the ability to add bitmap textures to a material. So far this only works while setting the texture from our material editor. If you add the bitmap from SketchUp's material editor, it doesn't reflect the changes in our material editor, or in the resulting render. This will be added soon though.
The infinite plane was added at last, so now we can test renders with ground planes. This can be quite useful when you're trying to determine if the translation of a piece of geometry is being set correctly, or if the shadows are being casted properly, etc. We're happy to see it's bright and shining face back in our renders again.
We can now save and load new scenes! This was not in place before, so it made things a bit difficult to test in some cases. When you are working with a development build of a product, loading and saving scenes isn't always that useful though, especially when major changes are being made to the way things are represented in the product. We now have things at a somewhat defined state, so loading and saving should be able to come in handy in some cases.
For all of those Windows users out there that have suffered headaches during our install process because you do not have administrative privileges, help has arrived at last! Set down that phone, don't call your IT guys just yet, because we have eliminated the need to install our product with administrative privileges! Standard users around the world, feel free to smile excessively.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Eye Candy, Developer Style
It has been brought to our attention that a picture is worth 1,000 words. This is really exciting news for us, because that means that this post will be worth over 2,000 words! Not too shabby when you compare the measly 607 words contained in our previous post.
So what delicious eye candy do we have in store for you today? No one outside of this company has seen what V-Ray for SketchUp on Mac OS X actually looks like... until this very moment. So what shall we show you? Well let's see, how about the current state of the material editor, and a simple test render? I say this sounds like a solid plan, the only thing I would like to mention before we get started, is that this is still under development. Polish and shine are the last things we are going to work on, so if anything looks halfway done or unfinished... you're probably correct, it is literally half done and/or unfinished. We just thought you might want to see where it's at so far. So with no further delay, here is what our material editor is looking like so far:
So as you can see, the UI is still a little rough around the edges, but for the most part it's following the same basic format of our old product. The placement of various parameters hasn't been finalized, nor has the entire look and feel of the editor, but it's definately getting closer every day!
So that's our material editor, how about a render? Ask and you shall receive:
This render is using an override material, so don't panic. We have materials working for the most part, and we have the ability to assign them to objects, so that's most of the battle won right there. We do not have V-Ray materials being made for all SketchUp materials yet though, so in this case it was just easier to throw an override material on to the model for now. Don't worry, we'll show you some pretty colors soon enough. The interesting thing about this picture, isn't even really the rendered output, it's the Ruby Console output in the bottom left portion of this picture. If you read the text down there (you'll most definitely need to enlarge the picture to see this), it says "Scene processed in 1.93882203102112 seconds" and then it says that it took another 8 or so seconds to create our xml file. That means that the time between when you click render, and when the rendering process actually begins (at least in this scene) is less than 10 seconds! If that doesn't make you drool, I suggest you go and download a demo of our current product for comparison. Needless to say, this version seems a tad more responsive.
Well that's it for now everyone. I hope you are all as excited as we are about this product. If you aren't then stay tuned for more updates, we'll have your heart pumping before you know it!
Friday, May 15, 2009
Development Update! 5-15-2009
Over the past couple years, as we have strived to meet the demands of our customers, we have received a number of feature requests and suggestions from our customers. If you are one of those customers, let us be the first to say thank you. From this information we have been able to clearly identify key concepts and common themes, which we then took in to consideration when laying the groundwork for our next full product release.
One common theme we noticed, was that many of our users had suggestions for various customizations which would really be of great value in their industry. Whether it be a special kind of material, a certain UI change, or even something as simple as changing an icon for something, our users are telling us that they know what they want, and how they want it. Another common request we received, was to speed up V-Ray for SketchUp's scene parsing, which was just a tad slower than we had desired. This is a very crucial process that allows us to dissect the scene and translate it in to something V-Ray understands. In the long run, it's better to have this process be 100% accurate and a little slow, than 90% accurate and lightning fast, otherwise you might end up with geometry missing entirely. Another common suggestion we have received, is to have our software available not just on Windows, but on OSX and Linux as well. Of course we just make a plug-in that works with a host application, so obviously we can't make a plug-in that works on another operating system, unless the host application works on that operating system as well. Fortunately, SketchUp is currently available on Windows and OSX. We have been told that the folks over at McNeel are working on making a Mac version of their product (Rhinoceros) as well, so that provides us with an opportunity to develop a product for SketchUp, and possibly Rhinoceros in the future, on OSX. Of course there were many other suggestions and feature requests, but we felt that these ideas in particular, helped us find many of the kinks and flaws in our original design. Our product just wasn't as extensible and flexible as it needed to be.
Once we set all the pieces on the table, and started to look at how they all fit together, the solution became increasingly more obvious. Our product needed to be completely rewritten, so that it would be cross platform compatible, easily expanded upon, and faster (of course). The result, was better than any of us could have possibly expected. It took years to produce a product that was able to perform at the level that our users demanded, and that our customers are familiar with today. We began development of our redesigned product in January of this year, and in less than half a year (5 months), we have been able to nearly reproduce our original product of V-Ray for SketchUp in it's entirety on not just Windows, but OSX as well!
We are now at the stage where we can do some internal testing, and so far things are looking good. We hope to progress to larger test base within the next couple weeks, as we continue to move toward a solid release. We appreciate the overwhelming support that we have received from our customers, and we hope to be able to reciprocate with a product that will blow you away. Stay tuned, and keep an eye out for for further updates and screen caps on our main site (http://www.asgvis.com), as well as our Facebook page, Asgvis blog, and so on.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Welcome
Welcome one and all to the ASGvis Developer Blog. Our mission is to keep our users up to date with the latest information about the development and progress of our products. This is intended to be a one-way form of communication straight from our development team to our users. There should be an update at least once a month about where we are in our development process, maybe some screen shots, video, etc. Stay tuned for updates...
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