any planning for ies lighting support?
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@anon39580149 Thanks for the feedback, I will keep improving the GUI, but it will be lower priority than improving the plugin, since the goal is that you should never need the GUI, except when you prefer to render images outside of Rhino.
@l1407 Definitely IES support is in our plans, we know how important they are for people.
I always prefer standalone application like maxwell studio
Plugins crashed many time and i hope you make Bella plugin separated from Rhino menu like your old maxwell plugin for rhino or sketchup, it was better to understand and navigate
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I can understand that, this first release of the plugin focused on letting people render in Rhino without learning anything new, but from here I will bring Bella things into Rhino, so I will be looking for any feedback as that work proceeds.
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Right now i don’t know how to change materials in the plugin.
I setup them to look like metal or marble but with Bella they look like rough plastic ( i use custom material)
How to change hdr for refl, refr, illum, … like in GUI?
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I have written some tips & trick here, my guess is that you need to uncheck these boxes, so that you do not have reflections & illumination from a color dome instead of HDRI.
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What i mean is this
And how to convert materials?
Metal in Rhino don’t have many settings so the best choice is using custom materials but Bella recognize it as plastic, how to use materials in the plugin like in GUI?
The plugin translates the environment settings from Rhino, so for example a setup like this:
… will result in a Bella file like this:
At this point you must use the Metal type in Rhino to get a metal material in Bella. The next work is to bring Bella materials & textures into Rhino, in which case you will just use them directly.
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What if i want remove HDR from refraction? in GUI this is easy
Ok so right now we need use GUI , because in Rhino the materials are very limited
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Yes, it (removing refraction hdri) is not possible yet in the plugin since Rhino does not separate reflection & refraction. I can understand the wish for more power over materials (and other nodes like environment) very well, especially as you are a power user – it’s at the top of the list of priorities.
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@andy and @nathanletwory
This sounds like the golden opportunity to fully develop Rhino’s physically based materials for advanced rendering + support advanced (And easy) environment setup + exposure… I can not stress the importance of exposure enough…
If @jdhill is keen on supporting basic Rhino materials then I think cooperating with Bella would benefit all parts and the users a lot.
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Indeed exposure is needed, I have our camera hooked up to the rhino focal blur stuff, but will have to add plugin-specific parameters for exposure. In bella, exposure depends on shutter, fstop, and ISO, but is also optionally expressed using EV (exposure value) and a priority parameter.
Priority (when not set to manual mode) controls which of the 3 is held constant to achieve the desired exposure value – the default is priority=aperture, so you can change exposure without affecting DOF and vice versa. That’s not rocket science, but if mcneel guys want it, I can give them the relevant code – in rhino it would be great if just a single EV parameter were added under Aperture in the focal blur panel. Then, in a plugin-specific panel I’d add the advanced stuff for full manual control.
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That’s what I have in mind too. Either as a -1 → +1 (or -100 → +100 if that makes more sense) and to have this affecting OpenGL too, but then also with a toggle to turn that on and off.
This should probably be stored with the NamedView settings too.
We use EV as an absolute value assuming ISO=100, as generally discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value. See especially Table 2, Tabulated exposure values, so a person can quickly get in their mind generally what value is needed for a given lighting scenario.
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This is incredibly exciting. @jdhill I remember you from my Maxwell forum days. I love the idea of a new engine that has thoughtfully considered the Rhino environment. Will definitely try this out
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I’m interested in this. Downloaded the plugin, but don’t seem to (at first blush) understand where the Toolbar is to create Materials, etc, inside Rhino. And the Stand-alone GUI is not what I’m looking for.
I don’t use Grasshopper. Is this a node-based renderer, or can I use it like Rhino Cycles?
The standalone GUI is included mainly to allow rendering externally, so you can keep working in Rhino (there is also less overhead so rendering is a bit faster). Bella is node-based internally, but that is not yet exposed in the plugin.
So, in this first version of the plugin, it indeed works similar to the Cycles Raytraced display mode; there are no special materials to create, you just use Rhino’s own materials and they are auto-translated by the plugin. Like Cycles Raytraced, you can render with Bella in the viewport by choosing the Bella display mode from the viewport tab.
I have written a short list of tips here that can help you get up to speed, regarding how materials/environments/etc are translated.
Have you looked at our latest Post effect improvements in V7?
No, I had to uninstall the WIP as part of an m.2 SSD upgrade and then the corona caos hit us 
I am most interested in realtime rendering feedback and think that it is important for the post effects to be visible there too. Are they? And do you have any examples? (I don’t have time to play with rendering now since I am a home-school-teacher today 
Homeschooling was forbidden in Sweden until only a few days ago. 
// Rolf
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