Eye Candy, Developer Style

Ping This!

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!

Development Update! 5-15-2009

Ping This!

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.