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.
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