Cycles + Bongo?

Serengeti (Rhino WIP) Rendering WIP
3

Nathan,

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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  1. Blender has MicroPoly displacement with Cycles and it’s awesome. If Rhino could get this too with Cycles it would be amazing.
  2. Channels for post production editing
  3. “Invisible to Camera” option for objects within a scene
  4. Rhino’s Clipping Planes to work with Cycles – I think this is a big one and hugely useful.
  5. Double sided materials
  6. SSS
  7. Translucency
  8. Rhino’s decals to work with Cycles
  9. 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.
  10. Bloom and Glare
  11. White balance adjustment
  12. Alpha channel for background
  13. Environment medium

Feature requests for Cycles and Bongo Animations:

  1. Ability to animate Camera DOF
  2. Object Motion Blur
  3. Ability to animate Cycles material displacement (and micro poly displacement if it is available)
  4. Ability to animate both intensity and color for lights and emissive materials

I know this was a long post, thanks for reading it.