Disclaimer :
I hope this will not be considered spam. I do not work for Light Tracer, and I am not affiliated with them at all. I only speak as a recent user of their software.
I am finding that I am using the built in renderer in Rhino more than before, however I believe that adding another rendering app to my toolbox doesn’t hurt especially when it is available at a very reasonable price.
Light Tracer is still in its infancy, but it render quality is excellent. It currently needs more development to mature, and I hope that the missing features will implemented some time in the near future.
I don’t want to sound redundant, but I ONLY financially support companies that offer perpetual licenses, and Light Tracer offers that (that is what they told me prior to placing an order)…
Me to, to a degree. I will subscribe, but only if I can pay monthly and the monthly cost isn’t a total rip-off. That way I can ditch the software if it doesn’t work without having to pay for an entire year. If the vendor quotes a monthly price and only actually offers yearly (to make the cost look smaller), that’s instantaneous game over for me.
I’ve definitely noticed a correlation between subscriptions and stagnating software development. Ironically, it’s the complete opposite of what subscription-based vendors claim: Perpetual licensed software tends to develop faster, and even has better support, than most every subscription based product I’ve used. The theory was that subscription fees would fund further development, but in reality it seems that teams get lazy and have little incentive to improve their products (looking at you Autodesk!!).
Light Tracer is the cheapest rendering app I’ve seen so far. It also seems to have relatively low system requirements. I might give it a try. I’m (to slightly contradict what I just said above) going to do a trial with Enscape, partially due to the fact that I just need to try to do something quick (and it has a monthly option…). Maybe later this year I’ll give it a whirl.
I may have sounded like an absolutist when I stated that I will not support companies that offer monthly subscriptions. In fact I would have had no problem if they offered their SAS model as an option with pragmatic incentives and reasonable terms.
Clearly, we are on the same wavelength regarding this whole subscription business. The points you made are totally valid, and I fully share your position. Now, only time will tell how sustainable this subscription business will be. So, far it seems to work great for many in the software industry.
Here is one recent article I read a few months ago from the Harvard Business Review talking about the subscription business :
If I remember correctly when Spaceclaim (a companion to Rhino) was first launched as an innovative CAD system, people got excited to buy it, and I was one of them. Then, they announced that it will only be offered as a subscription. What happened soon after was not too many people were willing to go with the subscription service. So, Spaceclaim people turned around and decided to offer it as a perpetual license. I myself was willing to buy, but not rent it; I only purchased it when it was finally offered as a perpetual license.
I am sure you are familiar with all the disappointments people have expressed with software companies that decided to go the Adobe way. You know, we could waste a great deal of time talking about it, but life is too short.
I know that they two camps on this subscription issue, so I don’t anticipate the controversy to go away anytime soon.
I was interested in testing Enscape, but the subscription turned me off. You may want to test it against Twinmotion (Perp Lic) and see if the quality is similar. D5 Render is another worth looking at, but unfortunately it also chose the Adobe, Autodesk… route.
Regarding Light Tracer, it is GPU based renderer, which can be a problem for those who don’t have fast video cards, but its output quality is (I believe) on par with Keyshot. It still is in development, and I hope they’ll make it Rhino friendly. Give it a try, you’ll really like the result!
I tried Twinmotion but unfortunately had issues with texture mapping. Looking at potential fixes produced pretty bleak results. I just tried Enscape and had somewhat similar, but not as severe issues… and solved it quite quickly. I might give Twinmotion another try using a similar solution. V-Ray and Twinmotion are the industry standards, and I can see why: I’ve had the least amount of trouble with both those products. But I feel like whenever a company goes “subscription only”, it’s an invitation for their competition to come in and compete. I can see other rendering options becoming more and more competitive as time goes by. Aside from the texture mapping issue (which unfortunately might be coming from Rhino), Twinmotion did feel like the better product.
It’s funny because even relatively small mobile apps are trying to use subscriptions: Like $10 per month for something that’s barely even worth $10 as a one time purchase.
Wow, $10 for a phone app! Weren’t phone apps selling for around a dollar a piece in a not so distant past? Crazy world we live in!
I attended a TwinMotion webinar a few months ago, and it looks like that their roadmap was pretty ambitious. From what I saw on YouTube, there were very few users who produced some pretty impressive work using TwinMotion. The rendered works from other users looked pretty cliche. I still think that the software has progressed quite well in such a short period of time.
I had an issue with texture mapping too; maybe its because I am no expert with the program. Overall, I still think it’s a great rendering package for the price.
I think the subscription model will push a lot of people to start learning applications like Blender, DaVincy…
I’m sure there are still $1 apps. This was some sort of construction calculator.
The good news is that the Twinmotion texture mapping issues were a similar situation to those in Enscape. I changed the “type” from “surface” to “box”. I’ve also changed whatever the default value in “projection” was before (“ray” I think). This was actually based off a suggestion from a forum member in one of my previous posts:
This seems to have fixed most of the texture mapping issues. I also had to change some sub-d’s to meshses. I think with Twinmotion I would need to use Twinmotion’s lights (my Rhino lights aren’t looking too great). Overall appearance is quite a bit better in Enscape but especially with regards to the Rhino lights (not that my laptop is the best device to judge either platform). Rhino to Enscape coordination feels way better than Twinmotion’s “datasmith”. At a glance, Twinmotions asset library seems to be the better of the two. I also had a much easier time importing textures from Twinmotion. The main problem with Twinmotion and textures is that objects that share a given material are ‘combined’ and you can only apply a single material (and mapping) to that entire grouping. It’s very restricting.
When I dug it I came to a similar conclusion: Just not a lot of people seem to be using Twinmotion and Rhino.
The advantage of Enscape over Twinmotion/Lumion/etc is, that you don’t need to export anything to some standalone renderer. You can stay in Rhino, do materials/texturing and assets (proxies) directly in the scene. For me, that’s important because architecture and vegetation/furniture often ‘react’ to each other. Also, with autoupdate on, you don’t have to care little about exporting.
(However, this autoupdate mechanism has it’s glitches, and sometimes is necessary to restart Enscape)
You figured out the texture mapping issue so you might just be the best guy to give it a test run!
I seem to be having a displacement issue now in Enscape which means my bricks look like wall paper (kind of, the normal map kind of sort of looks like it’s being recognized).
I was impressed but at the same time let down with Twinmotion (due to the texture mapping and a few other things), but to be honest I’m not 100% sure that’s all due to Twinmotion. I’d love to have another crack at it. And if in fact Rhino lights don’t work in Twinmotion, I would be okay with that because on my older laptop, lights tend to be a bigger resource drain in Rhino than they are in the rendering programs.
With Enscape, I kind of got lucky and was able to figure out most of the issues right away. One for example was sunlight leaking into my building: You have to set it to “night time” outside or your interior, even if sealed, might be way too bright. Even increasing the brightness of the night sky affects how bright my “closed” interior is.
Back to Light Tracer: One thing I’m keen on testing out is how well it performs on my older PC. My PC is really being tested using Enscape/Twimotion and even Cycles (actually, especially Cycles). I know that several years ago, renderings still looked pretty good on less powerful equipment. Most rendering engines are becoming less and less friendly towards slower PC’s. We’ll have to see what Light Tracer things of my 3 year old $1,000 (USD) PC .
I agree it is always nicer to work within the Rhino environment as we can set up objects/materials/textures… and be able to visualize them live. However, if I have to chose between a rental application that offers an improved productivity advantage versus a perpetual one. Then, I am afraid I would stick with the later one as I know that I can always open the file anytime I want to even if I am no longer active in the industry.
At the end of the day, whatever works for one is all that matters. Also, I am not chastising anyone who uses rental software; I just have a serious philosophical difference with renting tools I use on a daily basis.
I simply hope that TwinMotion doesn’t switch to the rental model, because that would be a major disappointment! Unreal seem to be branching out into diverse industries, so TwinMotion customers should technically be able to benefit from the different applications that the company offers. Only time will tell what happens in the future.
I personally haven’t tested the app on my old computer, but I’m afraid the outcome is not going to be pretty. Even though the following solution seems pointless to me; adding a eGPU to an old system may do the trick I don’t know. It would be interesting to investigate though.
Let us know if and when you get the chance to test it on you older PC.
I use Rhino and Twinmotion. There are solutions to your texture mapping challenges. You can replace texture by object or by material. Just need to pick. You also have the option flatten materials upon import or unflatten upon reimport. The datasmith export is the best because it retains texturing work if you need to edit the model and reexport and refresh in TM.
It’s nice to hear there’s a viable workflow as Twinmotion is quite a bargain for what it does. I unfortunately moved onto Enscape before finding a solution to the texture mapping (believe me I tried), but I’ll likely give it another go in the future.
I wasn’t able to pick each individual object within Twinmotion itself and ‘override’, so to speak, it’s material. This would include overriding sub-objects. I was using the trial version. It seemed that objects were firmly grouped together based on whatever material they had applied to them within Rhino. This wouldn’t have been so bad if the model was used for rendering/visualization only, but that just wouldn’t work for my workflow. Are you finding that you have to model in a certain way to make things work with Twinmotion or is it something you can manage within Twinmotion itself?
After using Enscape, having a similar texture mapping issue, and using a similar suggestion to something Tay.0 had suggested, I went back into Twinmotion and found that using “box mapping” on each object more or less cleaned most of the texture issues up (Rhino’s default mapping is “surface”). Having the objects ‘locked’ together still presented some problems. Rhino lights also looked way better in Enscape than in Twinmotion. But I think that maybe a visual artist would be better off using the rendering programs lighting, and only importing emissive materials from Rhino, opposed to trying to use Rhino’s lights.
Enscape’s connectivity to Rhino was far easier for me to work with than the Datasmith was, but Twinmotion is such a bargain that I’ll give it another try someday; I’m sure I can get used to the Datasmith.
I would imagine that you are already aware of their educational version when you downloaded TM, so you can still use it for testing purposes.
Their forum is pretty active; so I assume they’re very busy addressing existing bugs, and adding new features. Last time I attended their webinar; I asked for the ability to include templates for different industries (product design…). Now, I can see that they’ve added templates for product and automotive rendering. No doubt the product is maturing, and it may take some time for it to reach its full potential!
I am planning on testing Reality Capture here shortly to appreciate the quality of their processing method (I admit that I don’t fully understand their licensing strategy in details to comment about it right now).
Hi everyone,
I wonder if there is any new/additional feedback on Lighttracer? Especially looking for an industrial design models’ implementation.
Also has anyone tried to install Luxcore as a plug-in in rhino 7 in 2023? rhino7
I have tried many rendering plugins for Rhino (Keyshot, Maxwell, Arion, Thea, Bella, V-ray, I-ray), currently I only use Bella render for industrial design. It is of high quality right out of the box.
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