I’m late to the game here, but just discovered that cycles is going to be available for Rhino V6. That is great news, as the Cycles capabilities in Blender are terrific. I tried searching the forums for the questions below, but was unable to find the answers.
Is Cycles going to be shipping integrated into Rhino V6, like grasshopper, or is it a completely separate plugin that will need to be purchased in addition to Rhino?
I know it’s integration is still in development, but do you know at this point if the plan is to have Cycles properly work with Bongo?
Currently, I used Octane for Rhino, and Octane and Rhino work very well together, I’m very pleased with Octane, but there are a couple of issues with regards to animation with Bongo using Octane. So, if the answer to 2 is yes, then I will definitely have some other questions and some thoughts regarding this.
You can already test it - the viewport mode Raytraced. It’ll be available when you install Rhino WIP (6).
A way to create shader graphs probably will be available eventually as well - you may have seen the GhShaderNodes topics in this subforum, along with videos on how the work progresses. But it is currently unknown when or how it will be shipped to users (in an official capacity that is - you already can download and install the pre-release alpha-grade Grasshopper plug-in. Use at own risk Just 7 hours I released the latest version Release pre-alpha v0.0.2 · mcneel/GhShaderNodes · GitHub )
I’m sure we’ll be working on getting the two work together nicely. I have mr. Bongo in the room next to me, so the chances to get this all working nicely are pretty good!
This is good news. So, maybe I’m still misunderstanding, but since you mention Cycles is in the V6 WIP, does that mean that it is also planned to be part of Rhino V6 when it becomes a paid product upgrade available to the public? Or will Cycles be a complete separately purchased plugin?
Ok, since the plan is most likely to have Bongo and Cycles working together, I do have a few questions and requests, if they are possible. And I realize that cycles is still a work in progress, so it might not be possible to answer these questions just yet, they may be pre mature.
One, huge issue with using Octane and Bongo, is that Octane must re load the scene for every single frame onto the GPU. Not a big deal for small product animations, but for architectural animations – this adds a ton of time onto the animation. This doesn’t happen in other programs. It is my understanding that this happens because the code running the Octane plugin is not able to access the Rhino API and obtain the object locations. There is a discussion regarding this that explains it much better here: https://discourse.mcneel.com/t/octane-scene-loading/28702/7
So, my question is, if Cycles is written specifically for Rhino, will Cycles alleviate the problem mentioned above? Meaning an entire scene reload for every single frame would not be needed with Cycles.
Currently, there is no way to animate Octane material features with Bongo. You can, however, animate some of the Rhino material features. From reading about Cycles in rhino, it looks like cycles will be using Rhino materials – if this is the case, it would lead me to think that Bongo will be able to take advantage of animating the same material properties in Cycles that it can in Rhino – would you guess this to be a correct assumption?
Feature requests for Cycles for Rhino (you may already have some of these on a list somewhere, but I couldn’t find any “future features” list on the forums). I haven’t been able to test Cycles yet of course, so some of these may already be available. I list these, because I think they are important features for many of us creating paid production renderings and animations.
Blender has MicroPoly displacement with Cycles and it’s awesome. If Rhino could get this too with Cycles it would be amazing.
Channels for post production editing
“Invisible to Camera” option for objects within a scene
Rhino’s Clipping Planes to work with Cycles – I think this is a big one and hugely useful.
Double sided materials
SSS
Translucency
Rhino’s decals to work with Cycles
Any real world values would be greatly appreciated for any materials as opposed to the 0-100% sliders Rhino currently has. For example, “watts” for emissive materials. MUCH easier to understand real world values in my opinion.
Bloom and Glare
White balance adjustment
Alpha channel for background
Environment medium
Feature requests for Cycles and Bongo Animations:
Ability to animate Camera DOF
Object Motion Blur
Ability to animate Cycles material displacement (and micro poly displacement if it is available)
Ability to animate both intensity and color for lights and emissive materials
I know this was a long post, thanks for reading it.
It is in, available as the Raytraced viewport mode.[quote=“Ryan4, post:3, topic:40967”]
One, huge issue with using Octane and Bongo, is that Octane must re load the scene for every single frame onto the GPU. Not a big deal for small product animations, but for architectural animations – this adds a ton of time onto the animation. This doesn’t happen in other programs.
So, my question is, if Cycles is written specifically for Rhino, will Cycles alleviate the problem mentioned above? Meaning an entire scene reload for every single frame would not be needed with Cycles.
[/quote]
Part of my work to integrate Cycles into Rhino was to help create a framework that makes it easy to integrate a render engine using the RhinoCommon SDK. The Raytraced viewport mode is building on that framework. For viewport interactive realtime rendering we created the ChangeQueue. Utilizing this integration plug-ins can much more easily access the Rhino data in a unified way. It shouldn’t be a big step to ensure that Bongo and the ChangeQueue play well together for the benefit of render engines. Cycles, aka Raytraced will use that.
Not fully fleshed out yet, but it is possible to create render content that is possible to animate through Bongo.
Probably eventually.
Sure, I fully intend to expose what Cycles calls render passes, Rhino knows them as channels.
Should be possible, no idea yet how I am going to implement that.
There is already a very simple translucent material if you use TestShowPrivateContent. Note that the Cycles materials accessible through this aren’t necessarily always properly working (I don’t test them).
Decals already work
Probably a nice idea, but specific Cycles (Raytraced) materials are probably something of 6.x, not the first 6 release.
Those are compositor gimmicks.
Not sure about that.
Not looked at much yet, but shouldn’t be hard to fix if it doesn’t work properly yet.
Not tested, but probably possible already through GhShaderNodes.
If Bongo can access Rhino camera data then this is already possible.
Nice to have, but not yet high on the list.
I suppose it should be possible (apart from micro poly, which I haven’t investigated yet at all)
As long as Bongo can access such parameters it should be no problem.
Nathan, again this is all great news, thank you for taking the time to answer all of my questions I really do appreciate it.
Is it necessary to use Grasshopper to do more complex rendering with Cycles? I’ve never used Grasshopper, so I’m not very familiar with the process. Or, is it rather just used for the time being until more development is implemented with Cycles?
Regarding your comment on Bloom and Glare, did you mean that this is something the Rhino window will handle, or something we’d be expected to do in post in another program entirely, like Photoshop? The reason I ask, is that bloom and glare occur in photography and add hugely to the realism of an image. It can be hard to accurately add in post if we’re talking about animations. Bloom and Glare are in all of the render engines I can think of.
Looks TERRIFIC!!! Hard to imagine Rhino having this capability natively.
Sorry for the ignorant question. Except for the algorithm inside the viewport under raytraced Cycle is not part of the Rhino rendering engine? I only see Rhino Renderer and Legacy Renderer
Thank you
Just 7 hours I released the latest version