Vray for Rhino 6 is only loading .vrmat materials and seems to not recognize .vismat materials. Problem is, all my favorite materials (wood, ceramics, marble, etc) are all .vismat. I’m really annoyed I made the switch if I’m being honest as the .vrmat library is still extremely limited compared to the .vismat one, and when you need (for example) a specific wood type for a project, this basically makes it impossible to do it any kind of justice.
It also makes FlyingArchitecture materials unusable.
Is there a workaround for using .vismat materials in Vray for Rhino 6? Any help would genuinely be great.
afaik, sadly no. If you want to render only specific objects you could try to export them as a .vrscene file. But for materials it’s only vrmat. May I ask what features you are missing?
It is not necessary to change vismats files to .vrmat.
In most cases, renaming the file extension works without issues. However, older (binary) .vismat materials created before v1.5.1 cannot be successfully converted this way. Additionally, full backward compatibility of v3.0 vrmat files is not guaranteed in V-Ray 2.0.
Having both .vrmat and .vismat files in a single scene will not cause any issues.
It’s just specific materials that as far as I know aren’t available in Vray for Rhino 6 that were for Rhino 5. For example: I have two current freelance projects that each need a material that’s available in Vismat but not in Vrmat–Marble aesthetic for one (specifically green marble, but at this point any marble would do), and a walnut wood material in the other (specifically light walnut). Honestly, though, none of the vrmat wood materials are halfway as realistic as the ones FlyingArchitecture.com offers in vismat, so this would be a problem with any wood type.
They mean literally editing the name of a vismat file to vrmat, right (Ex: Walnut.vismat --> Walnut.vrmat)? I saw that suggestion, although I haven’t been able to successfully do this with any vismat material, be it FlyingArchitecture.com, Vismat.com, etc. I’ve tried it with, like, 20 materials.
Great suggestions, Konrad. Weirdly, there are very few articles, videos, forum discussions tackling this seemingly sizable issue with Vray for Rhino 6, which is why I thought I must be missing something obvious.
One handy thing I learned recently is that you can drag n’drop the bitmaps into their slots or even in the path. With is technique you only have to be carefull to set all bw maps (glossiness, etc also normals) to linear space, since it autodefaults to screenspace.
