Custom Renv

Is there any way to make custom renv files easily. The ones in Rhino work quite good but it would be nice to be able to make custom ones of a site. Also is it ok to change the names of the renv files is this a problem?

Thanks, Cathal

Hi Cathal - these are xml files as far as I know - the hard part might be writing the bitmap into that, I don’t have any idea hgow that is handled.

-Pascal

Easiest is to just create a new basic environment and then load a good hdri image. You can find many on say polyhaven.com - I like their HDRi images a lot as they work well with Raytraced and Rhino Render in Rhino 7. Especially if you take one with very high EV range - it’ll do great lighting.

Name your environment, then right-click it to save to disc as an .renv file.

That sounds great just what I was looking for. Sometimes I get blurry site pics and they look bad when blown up. The renders from Rhino look really good and quite quick to do.

Ah not so easy, I can download hdri but how do you convert to .renv file?

Go to Environments panel

kuva

Scroll down in listing and click on big plus, then choose Basic Environment

Then click on the ‘click to assign texture’ entry

Choose your downloaded image

Right-click the environment and choose Save As File… to save as an .renv

You can of course start using the new environment in the document you created it in right away without first having to save as .renv. But as .renv you can easily reuse in other 3dm files.

Here for instance just a high power hdri: Street Lamp.

No lighting primitives, just the skylight using the hdri

That is just great. The quality is amazing and so fast to do. One thing can these images be cleaned up or edited anyway like in photoshop maybe to take out stuff…Many Thanks,

Hi @studiocathal
Yes, sure thing. Just make sure to keep it as a 32-bit picture. The extra bit channels are what makes it emit light when used as a rendering enviroment. Other than that, you can blur, clone, smear etc. to your heart’s content :slight_smile:
HTH, Jakob

Been trying photoshop editing on 32bit. I am on a 2017 iMac and 32bit really slows it down. For some reason also if I edit a hdri, then export with pshop the resulting image looks much darker when imported into Rhino…

@studiocathal I would add that you can drag and drop an image file into a Rhino viewport and you’ll get an option to make an environment from it. I’d suggest using HDRI as reflection and skylight enviromnents but a single exposure image as the backdrop environment in the Rendering panel. These will tend to look less saturated and won’t compress tonally on our non-HDR monitors. Look for “equirectangular panoramas” online for images that will wrap nicely into a sphere for the backdrop once they become an environment.

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