Unsupported version of V-Ray material

Rendering V-Ray
1

Hi, I cannot open any of my older Rhino file in V6 as I am getting this pop-up
“Unsupported version of V-Ray material”
I have switched to the Rhino renderer as well with no success.

2

I suspect if your disable the Vray plug-in, and restart Rhino, you’ll be able to open the file.
I don’t know if that will be helpful or not.

3

Thank you John for the fast reply. I found a thread on the V-ray forum- basically its a bug with the latest version of V-ray.
But thanks for reaching out.

4

yes it’s annoying. It happens with pre- version 2 scenes i believe. Workaround is either hitting enter until it has gone through all (can be many) or install one of the previous versions of Vray as shown in this thread:
https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/v-ray-for-rhino-forums/v-ray-for-rhino-public/1006679-vray-invalid-materials

5

Thank you- I gave it a go and that worked!

6

found a way in, boot rhino in safe mode. Don’t allow vray extension to launch. Import model. To save the model from this issue you’ll have to delete materials from it. This will salvage geometry but obviously it’ll have to be retextured and remapped :slight_smile: good luck everyone

7

Hello to everyone,

We keep on having a similar issue. We have some files modeled with Rhino 5, with all materials and lights set up for an older version of Vray. If we open these files in Rhino 6 with Vray 3.6 installed, we get the warning below, which ends up becoming a loop. Even by pressing “esc” many times, nothing really helps and we have to end the Rhino 6 task with the task manager.

image

We understand that earlier versions of Vray are no longer supported, however, what we hope is not to have to re-assign completely from scratch all the materials and lights, duplicating the work we have done already, purely because materials cannot be read properly between different versions of Rhino and Vray.

Many thanks for your help

Luca

8

what could help is to install one of the earlier 3.6 versions (3.6.01 or even 3.40.03 on Rhino 5?) and migrate your scene in Rhino 5. I assume you don’t need to render anymore in Rhino 5, so you could use your Rhino 5 installation to migrate older scenes.
Keep hitting esc. will eventually work though but it can take many…

9

Thanks Gijs. I found installing Vray quite troublesome already, in term of license, so I am not sure if it is actually possible to install two different versions of V-Ray on two diffent version of Rhino. The assumption is that an installation of a more recent V-Ray on Rhino 5 will be able to then read models containing render settings from previous versions. Has anyone tried it before? I am quite surprised that are very few people on the planet to have a similar issue!

10

Hi luca_biselli,
I can confirm that the message appears because the version of the file being opened is too old and now unsupported. A bit more sophisticated message appears in the current version, only it appears once, not for every material.
The only way to work around the problem is to install a previous version that still supports the version and save the file - that’s pretty clear as well.
Unfortunately V-Ray for Rhino installations cannot be mixed (at least not out of the box). If you install one version it will uninstall all previous versions on both - V5 and V6.
This however does not include the license server. You can install any 3.x version without licensing complications. Just make sure you do not uninstall or reinstall the licensing server that comes with the V-Ray for Rhino installer.

Here at Chaos we often need to switch between versions and do a little trick to have all the versions at once.

  • Install version A (for example 3.40.01);
  • Rename the folder to something appropriate like “C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\V-Ray for Rhinoceros\3.40.01”;
  • In Rhino settings panel, click the install button and point to the .rhp file in that renamed path;
  • Install version B (for example 3.60.03);
  • follow the steps above.

Now you can switch the versions with a couple of clicks in the Rhino settings panel.
We have a small tool to directly tamper with the registry entries instead of clicking around the settings panel. But the idea is the same

Mind that you will never be able to successfully uninstall those versions. The will even not appear in the uninstall panel in Windows. If you need to get rid of them, just delete the folders

Here is the result
image

This is not an official guide, of course, just a hint

1 Like
11

Hi Nikolay,
Many thanks indeed for your detailed explanation.
Luca