Creating Believable Materials - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 188

Using a SketchUp material to create our
diffuse floor coloring
One thing that we will probably want to get straight as we begin the material creation
process would be the question of what workflow or workflows we can or should use
as we create materials in V-Ray for SketchUp.
On the one hand, it could be that we are an experienced V-Ray user who has been
asked to produce some work inside the SketchUp application, and so we will naturally
prefer to approach the texturing process from a V-Ray workflow or pipeline perspect-
ive.
On the other hand, it could be that we are a long-time SketchUp user who has become
completely comfortable with the basic material workflow in SketchUp, and have pos-
sibly built up a comprehensive library of our own SketchUp materials over a number
of years. For this reason, we would probably feel much more comfortable if we could
approach the texturing process from a SketchUp-oriented perspective. Alternatively,
it may be that we are new to both pieces of software and would like to see all of the
approaches available and then choose one that simply works well for us.
Well, seeing that there are aspects of how materials work in SketchUp that will be im-
portant for us understand no matter which render engine or approach to material work
we decide to adopt, let's make a start here by first looking at a more SketchUp-cent-
ric approach. We will look at how we can go about using materials from a SketchUp
material library while getting them to render correctly in V-Ray.
Using SketchUp materials with V-Ray
In fact, what we can do is go ahead and imagine that we are a long-time SketchUp
user who wants to use a material from a library of our own. (I say imagine because
we will in fact only work with a default SketchUp material here. However, as the steps
we use would be identical even if the material were one of our own, a little imagination
won't hurt.)
Before we do anything with SketchUp materials, however, we need to go to the main
V-Ray toolbar and click on the big M button to open up the V-Ray material editor for
ourselves. We need to take notice of the fact that we currently have only two materials