Vray Sketchup High Resolution Render Settings

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Rita Seliba

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Aug 5, 2024, 8:14:05 AM8/5/24

to causondipos

Ihave a super simple rendering of a few metallic chain links in a perspective view that need to render in high resolution for printing purposes. The resolution is approx. 21000 x 21000 px and it just keeps crashing.

I'm doing some comparisons on 2K vs 4K materials to see if it's ever worthwhile to use the latter, given the higher memory usage and file size for my larger projects. However, in some testing it seems the difference from 2K to 4K in Enscape is negligible, compared to what I see within SketchUp.

DLSS is OFF in Enscape. Also figured it might be Denoiser, but that doesn't seem to do anything noticeable in this test scenario either. Color is mapped only in the examples attached (no bump, reflections, etc). Hopefully the attached images don't get compressed too hard and this all shows as I see it here on screen.

what's the texture scaling in the material? Enscape automatically downscales textures that have a small scale in the scene to avoid unnecessary memory consumption. Thus if you increase the scale in the material the 4k resolution texture should look notebly different from the 2k texture. We support up to 16k resolution for largest scale use-cases, e.g. using satellite images on an environment model.

What I usually do is set up the material (say, from Poliigin) in SketchUp at the tiling scale they show, which is usually around 3m x 3m (call it 10' x 10' for us USA users). If Enscape reduces the resolution of the material, how am I supposed to get a high resolution material to show in a close-up/macro view? Is there a size/scale that Enscape decides at which to downscale the resolution?

Is there some sort of logic I can follow to avoid automatic downscaling of my materials? I'm not sure I understand why Enscape would do that on it's own, when it's very simple to replace the material maps with higher/lower resolution files individually as needed. Plenty of memory available.

Here's another example of a nice Carrara Marble that loses a lot of the vein definition. It's scaled per the Poliigon guidance (8'-2" x 8'-2") within SketchUp and Enscape, but it being compressed it seems still.

Right now, there's no option to avoid that. We discussed adding something like a check-box to the material editor like rifkin suggested, but it wasn't a priority yet. The reason we do it, was quite frankly, because people are simply not aware how much memory such high resolution textures consume and it'd be a cumbersome manual task to go over potentially hundreds of materials and manually downscale their texture maps. Running out of GPU memory is actually one of the most common issues people are facing with Enscape and texture maps can eat up a significant portion of that.

Clemens Musterle I totally get the rational for Enscape to be more designed around "simplicity," but assigning materials to objects (1k vs 2k vs 4k, etc) is trivial. Surely the Enscape team can see the use case of needing key elements in the models to be higher quality than the rest and needing to be able to control that. A key component of the design that the client is really going to appreciate makes a word of difference, and needs to stand out. For some of the more artistic rendered views it does make a difference. It can be a bit frustrating to not get the desired result only to find out that Enscape is squashing my texture maps quality behind the scenes and there's nothing to be done about it.

I see this daily with even just SketchUp - this weekend I spent hours picking apart a model made by a studio that had 10GB of geometry - it took up 30GB of system memory just to open. Because users have carte blanche access to keep dropping inappropriate amount of data into the file without knowing what the impact of that is.

I would like to share my utmost support for allowing full texture resolution.

Many of the most evocative compositions use elements in the foreground, mid-ground and background. Discounting one of the three is a real limitation for a render engine. If I recall correctly, Lumion has has this capability for some time and Twinmotion recently introduced it to broaden their market audience with product visualization as well.

So... in sketchup, this does not scale the camera so this is a non-starter production wise for sketchup users. However it should be possible for Enscape to enable a global scale adjustment that also scaled the camera.... this has been asked and ignored already.

I could see a nice compromise would be to have enscape by default downscale unless someone specifically noted to not downscale a specific texture. A way to apply this easily might be to put a keyword in the file name like they already do with grass and metal reflections etc or maybe a checklist of some sort that poeople can check and the code would skip that texture.

They've already made it very easy to place the appropriate material maps in the material editor, as with every other render engine. They've added the unnecessary complexity by choosing to automatically restrict/compress/downsize user-selected material maps in the background, without any documentation suggesting so (at least, I can't find any mention of it in the wiki pages). I spent way more time that I'd like to admit trying to figure out what what "wrong."

I don't see how it's deemed difficult to simply let a user choose their own appropriate material resolution manually. It's trivial to replace 4k maps with 2k on the fly, as needed- or to create our own quality versions.

Reading through all this, I am in favor of a solution where we can have an "opt-in" checkbox in the material editor when there's a specific material I know I need at full resolution. Otherwise everything else remains the default Enscape downscaling. (I'd also like a solution like in V-Ray where you can link a higher res image for rendering while keeping a lower res image within the Sketchup file.)

I'm still against some check is method because it think it's overly complex vs simply using appropriate maps. But, should that be the compromise, the check box should only be to downscale. Give users the ability to use the material maps they own and require.

So then why do we have a quality slider built-in as well as further performance related options available withing the settings menu? By this logic, the solution is a dead simple checkbox in the settings menu - AUTO-SCALING MATERIAL RESOLUTION: ON/OFF. No different than any of the already available checkboxes:

If a user is choosing to set up a custom material via the editor, I'll say it again - it's trivial to use a 1k map in the slots vs 4k (or 2K, etc) if they are concerned about performance. This functionality is already built-into the software and they can just remove the auto-scaling programming. For those that can't (or don't want to?), there are plenty of 1k maps available in the built-in material library.

I have had a ton of people asking me to create a more thorough breakdown of one of my images and it seems the desert house dusk shot would be a good candidate. I like this image because not a ton of Photoshop is needed for the illustration, but the little Photoshop that was needed had to be spot on. The process for this illustration is not complicated and I am going to try to break this image down into the most simplified way I can.

Some quick notes: I am using a slightly older version of Sketchup (2015) and V-Ray 2 for this tutorial. The settings I am describing are somewhat universal and translate similarly in newer and older versions of both Sketchup and V-Ray. For example, we are using the latest versions of both Sketchup and V-Ray (3) in our office at Design Distill and these settings remain largely the same though the interface is different. The important thing to take away from this tutorial is not the specific settings but the larger ideas of workflow and where to spend and not spend your time. Like I said, I am providing what I think are the most critical ideas that led to the creation of the this image and am not trying to get lost in the weeds of render settings.