Materials Libraries

I was watching an old video tutorial on materials for iRender. The tutorial is from 2010 and references a ‘Material Library’ button that will access the nXt libraries. My version of the software doesn’t have that particular button, but does have the paintbrush one that is titled ‘Select and Edit Materials’. Clicking the paintbrush brings up a window that has ‘In Model’, ‘nXt Library’, and ‘Sketchup’ directories. The nXtLibrary one is blank, and when I click it, I get an option to either browse or download the nXt libraries. Neither of those options seems to work. What please is the correct way to download and install the iRender materials libraries?

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on November 8, 2018 at 8:26am

Try going to our downloads page:

https://renderplus.com/wp2/download/

and downloading and running the install for the libraries.

Look for:

Then restart SketchUp and see if they show up on that dialog.

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Permalink Reply by Phil on November 8, 2018 at 11:01am

Thank you! Found them and successfully loaded them.

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on November 8, 2018 at 11:04am

Great!

Thanks for the update.

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Permalink Reply by Phil on November 8, 2018 at 11:19am

One more quick question please. Where is the proper place to indicate the HDR background in Setup Options: under 'HDRi', or 'Bgnd'?

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on November 8, 2018 at 11:41am

The HDRi that you can set in the HDRi tab is a spherical HDRi sky that is mainly used for lighting. It also can appear as the background for the rendering, but unless you have downloaded and selected a very high resolution HDRi file to use, they do not make very good backgrounds.

The Background tab is used to select an image that is just meant to be the backdrop for the rendering.

Beyond that, you probably need to read these pages:

http://www.renderplus.com/wp2/wk/HDRi_Skies.htm

http://www.renderplus.com/wp2/wk/Background_Image.htm

since HDRi images can be used for backgrounds and vice-versa.