The rendered mode and arctic mode works really nice on the 1070. Here is a project we are working on now, used a drone to take images for photogrammetry that resulted in a 75.000.000 point pointmesh and generated a 1.000.000 mesh:
(mesh split and mesh boolean is just as buggy as allways, so I had to make a custom script to cut out the parts I didn’t want. Subselecting meshes and deleting them works a lot better than in V5 though.
Here’s what it looks like in Arctic:
The AO intensity appears a bit weaker when manipulating the view, it would be nice if this was evened out a bit.
And here it is with a physical sky environment that uses the document sun. (Physical sky should have “use document sun” as default, or maybe even as the only option)
Hi, I just want to remind you guys to reset the display modes for the changes to take place!
I wanted to try the same file on the 970 card, so I launched the WIP, waited for the download, closed and installed, then restarted the machine as adviced, and opened rhino and it was very sluggish compared to the 1070. So I resat the display modes and that helped a lot. So I guess the next WIP should force a display mode reset to make sure users have the latest changes.
Have you tried setting the other display mode to AO as lighting to see if that is causing it?
You’re kidding me, right?
I have spent at least 30 minutes trying to find that sun that appears in your image 4 posts up (without ever finding such thing) and now you want me to go looking for lighting? -sigh-
Oh well, I just fell on the snow-covered ice getting out of my car with 3 PCs on my back - I might as well see if they still boot…
I’ll get back to you 
Hi Wim - I see this as well, though I have to zoom in quite a bit to see it - it is not more, here, than Shaded or Rendered though, which is what I’d expect I guess if the problem shows at all. Here it looks like the clipped faces on the ‘sides’ and the fill from the clipping plane are slightly out of sync. Anyway here this is not, so far, an Arctic thing I don’t think.
-Pascal
Hi @andy,
Currently the Arctic mode (or any Skylight-enabled mode) switches into the low-quality mode for any screen rotations etc. until the view movement stops. Obviously this speeds things up significantly and ‘on the move’ the lesser quality is not that noticeable. What I have noticed is that any scripts that deal with camera movement or interactive user view changes always operate in the ‘full quality’ AO mode, making things much slower. Would you be able to expose enabling/disabling the ‘draft AO’ mode for scripting purposes as this feature progresses ?
thanks,
–jarek
Hi @Andy,
After testing the new Skylight shading mode on several heavy scenes have to say this is a great improvement over V5 skylight, both with quality and speed. I find it very useful to add the ‘depth’ to the rendered mode rather than as the ‘arctic’ feature.
If there is a plan to make it work with transparency, could there be a threshold similar way that the shadows have currently? Either use the shadows one of have its own control.
Great job with this display improvement.
–jarek
I hear you, it’s a problem when zooming with the mouse wheel or doing view changes in code. Maybe @andy can comment on whether we want to introduce quality settings or not. Ideally the quality would not need to be changed.
Glad you like it! Drawing shadows behind transparent objects will be problematic, unfortunately. I already have a YT item for for generally improving skylight shadows + transparent objects https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-37188.
Is there any potential for an option to adjust the ground shadow size? As it is currently when doing page layouts the detail needs to be very large to avoid cutting off the shadow. On a simple page layout it’s not a big deal, but when trying to show more views it quickly becomes a problem.
I would suggest adding a simple vignette effect in your favorite image editing package.
I asked for this feature. Viewport Render Shadow Quality
jokingly said that, but in reality having a foreground image feature for viewports would allow you to simply load a mask/vignette ONCE. Then all your Viewcapture to clipboard images would look right.
Andy, many of us do not use image editing packages for everyday design documentation. Who has time for that? We take a screencapture and we post directly to Indesign, Word, Basecamp, or email body.
This is a very important feature. I wish you guys would know.
Thanks,
G
I don’t really see how it’s possible to do this automatically - how do we know how close stuff is to the edge?
I guess since the ground is a “shadowcatcher” then it would be “simple” to add a curvature to the shadow values that are transparent, so that dark is still dark, but light is lighter, thus making the shadow burn out faster.
You probably mean a fall-off.
Ah, that was a typo yes, I ment “CURVE” as in Photoshop. (It’s like levels where you can adjust both the white level, the black level and also the “mid-level”.)
So a variable falloff.
I will repeat myself but this keeps coming back from many users: please let us control the AO radius manually. It could help with the latest request as well.
