Bella for Rhino

lol, well that is strange, I’ll look into it, thanks for reporting! :slight_smile:

I was testing this via rhino 7, there rendering stays black, now in Rhino 6 things work better.
One thing I noticed is that rectangular lights need very high multipliers in order to be visible in the rendering.

Another thing which is strange: in Rhino 6 I do get 100% CPU usage, though not in Rhino 7 / Bella GUI

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Ah, I have not yet tested it with v7, it can be that behavior is subtly different. It is expected, depending on scene size, that high (or low) multipliers may be needed for lights, this will change as I add bella-specific settings into the plugin. Have not yet decided the best way to deal with this since Rhino intensity values are not physical like Bella ones.

We are currently looking into the threads issue, our code is not limiting anything, but I think I have to do research specifically for multi-cpu systems on win10 (related).

btw I have written some tips & tricks here that may be helpful getting started.

Just a heads-up to anyone reading, we were just this morning alerted to the fact that our web host has screwed something up, and it is making it impossible to create an account, or use our contact form – what a catastrophe! So we have a ticket into them, hopefully they will get it sorted quickly.

Hi Jeremy,
I have just tried again and could sign up successfully :o)

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hehe, go figure … they got it fixed even as I was writing, it appears … thankfully they were apparently not locked down due to coronavirus!

Thanks for reporting!

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Hi JD! Thanks and gratulations to the Rhino plugin from me too on this forum! It might have felt like a long wait, but now I’m really exited! :crazy_face:
Thank you and gratulations to Oscar and Albert as well! :+1: :+1: :+1:

Philip

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Another renderer company, not unknown to you, really cheesed off a lot of Rhino users with huge delays to the production of a Rhino 6 plugin. If you can have your plugin working in R7 early then that will earn you a lot of brownie points. If you can have it working in the R7 WIP you will get brownie points, love and affection. :heart_eyes:

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Well full disclosure, I wrote that plugin up through the V5 version. :wink:

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Also guys, remember that Rhino 7 is WIP. If Bella doesn’t work in V7, it’s more likely that we’ve broken something rather than JD.

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I don’t test it yet but i like alot the caustics.
Other images in the gallery don’t look impressive,
I will test it with a complex scenes.

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Yes unfortunately we do not yet have many impressive gallery pictures yet, being a young project most of the images there have been personally done by me.

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Let me know if you like me giving feedback in this particular thread or not. I’ve played around with Bella GUI a bit without reading any manual. My first impression is that it is not very intuitive to make changes to the scene. I have not yet been able to figure out how to change the camera position. If I click on a camera or on its xform I was expecting to see a camera position and target somewhere.
I downloaded the laser beam demo and wanted to set the camera to the second render you made where you look at the setup from the top. Changing the camera to top overview didn’t change its position. This is probably as designed, but I could not find any camera position presets it seems those are only camera settings presets and not position/target presets.
I then tried to modify the camera position with my Wacom pen. I found a way to zoom and rotate but not to a way to pan.
The way to modify a material/ assign a different material to an object is not straightforward. I found no way to drag materials to nodes, or a viewport mode where you can drag and drop materials to objects like in Rhino. In order to change a nodes material I had to click on an icon that looked more like an external link icon so it took a while to figure that out.
Is there a way to access the material settings found in Bella GUI directly from Rhino? I couldn’t find those in the material dropdown.
Will the resolution of the GUI change? Right now the icons are pixelated on my 4K screen.
I also wonder what happens if you make changes to the scene in Bella GUI and the. Realize later on something in the scene needs to be changed. Can you then add, replace, delete or modify items in the scene without having to start all over?

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Though it exposes quite a lot, the current purpose of the GUI is really just for rendering outside of a host application. A main thing it lacks currently is a 2D node graph, as well as some of what you mention with lack of drag/drop and so forth. It is really giving quite a low-level view of the scene.

If a person is determined they can do quite a lot with it, but our primary focus is on providing plugins, and the next steps for this Rhino plugin are to expose Bella nodes inside Rhino. There is not currently any associativity between the GUI and Rhino.

On the camera, there may be any number of cameras in a scene, with the one currently rendered being the one referenced in the Settings panel (by default tabbed on the left with the Camera panel), under Nodes, and likewise for the current environment, sun, ground plane, etc. Everything physically in a scene is placed using an xform, and this includes the camera, so it can be a bit confusing since the camera’s position is unrelated to the camera node itself.

You can navigate while rendering in IPR using maya key + mouse button combinations, ALT+left for orbit, ALT+right for zoom, ALT+middle for pan.

Regarding materials in the GUI, you can right-click on the material dot for an xform in the Hierarchy panel and choose or create a material. Left-clicking will select an xform’s assigned material in the Material panel.

Regarding pixelated icons, that is a bit confusing since we use all vector graphics for icons. I will have to do some research on the GUI framework we use in order to say anything about this. (edit: found something that may be promising, I’ll try it for the next build)

First test, in Rhino creating materials is not clear.
also in Bella GUI, the material editor need improvements

denoised

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You seem to catch on quick! :slight_smile:

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I test more complex scene in my old laptop
I can render it in Maxwell or Keyshot but in Bella it take long time to show big colored squares.
Maybe the problem related to gpu?

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Can it support ies or mesh lighting?

@anon39580149 Bella does not yet use GPU, and I would need more info about the scene (or a file) to try to see if there is some problem. The machine I usually work on is my old laptop.

@l1407 Bella supports mesh lighting yes, but not yet IES.

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I will try to make the scene simple and send it to you.
I notice that Bella detcet the name of the material and convert it automatically when export to GUI.
The problem even the material in Rhino have setting of metal for example but the name win in GUI, can you check this?

  • I also hope you add more features when export like group or merge object with the same materials or layers
  • Synchronize changes between plugin and GUI vice versa
  • Add create material menu to material tab and easily change between materials

I like the Bella and hope see more improvements

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