Cycles render engine in RM

What is polygon count for this file?

At any rate I wouldn’t use Raytraced view on machines that lack the oomph using that high resolution. DpiScale I’d set much higher and use the viewport for “quick” indication only, then do the actual rendering using -ViewCaptureToFile

@nathanletwory how would I get a depth channel out of a viewcapturetofile method, or other channels for that matter? One advantage of more sophisticated rendering engines is the ability to save out multiple additional channels which can help with photoshopping after.

@robinp Cycles itself already provides these channels. There already is the rhino-render-next plug-in, but TestPackageManager unfortunately doesn’t play very nice with it yet on the Mac. The rhino-render-next plug-in enables access to the depth channel.

Hi, I think that sounds vaguely positive but I’m afraid you’ve lost me with some of your post.

I think my knowledge of rhino development is letting me down. I’m not familiar with TestPackageManager nor the rhino-render-next plugin.

However, I’m aware that the render dialogue in V6 WIP looks much like the screenshot you have shown above and if it is possible or will be possible to render using cycles via that dialogue then great.

thanks
Robin

For users it eventually will be possible yes. The TestPackageManager is a way to get plug-ins, unfortunately it doesn’t play nice on the Mac just yet. (I hope @will, @dan and friends will make it happens sooner rather than later). The rhino-render-next plug-in is a production render plug-in interfacing for the Cycles render engine that is used in Raytraced.

The screenshot is of V6 WIP. I’ll see if I can publish a .macrhi package here that should work with V6 WIP for Mac.

Thanks, that sounds very promising. With regards to the rhino-render-next / V6 WIP render interface, it would be great to be able to save a single file with all of the additional channels included, either as channels or layers within a multi-layer file.

It would be also very helpful to have a couple of other options for channels such as:

  • AO and / or GI type layer (perhaps similar to the arctic display mode)
  • Object / material / render ID

Not sure if the above is even technically possible with Cycles?!

That would be very nice indeed. I think I made a feature request for the Render Window to support saving to EXR with all possible channels in one go. I couldn’t find it so I made a new YT issue for this feature request: https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-52758

All the channels Cycles support in the very least would be nice to have (here are the possible channels: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/settings/scene/render_layers/passes.html )

Marvellous. Looking forward to these and rhino-render-next etc. Thank you.

hi nathan, i could not find much information on this, can you briefly sum up what it is and what it can do? or at least post a link to some more info.

also, from what i have found and from what you write and from what i conclude now, is that going to be available as a standard part of rhino later and just a plugin while wip or how is that going to go?

It exposes Raytraced as a render engine you can set as current renderer to render in the render window, aka offline render, aka modal render, aka production render.

It will be the default renderer in Rhino 7 replacing the old Rhino Render. It’ll then be called Rhino Render.

rhino-render-next is for those who can’t wait until I get around making the change in Rhino WIP v7.

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@nathanletwory following on from our earlier discussion about CPU vs GPU, would getting an eGPU for my MacBook Pro speed up rendering performance at all? I’m not clear if Cycles uses both CPU and GPU or just CPU?

thanks

The theory is yes, BUT I have to say upfront that I don’t know how well it actually works, as I haven’t had yet the chance to test such a configuration. On the Mac the GPU(s) for such a configuration then have to be AMD GPUs, at least a GCN 2nd card, but probably GCN 4th or GCN 5th makes more sense (see this handy page for info on cards and architectures. I can say this much: the one Mac machine we have with a recent AMD GPU works fine using the GPU for Raytraced, I think @jeff also was able to use the AMD GPU on his Mac for testing.

In theory it is also possible to get both CPU and GPU render at the same time, but the Intel OpenCL support has been a bit spotty sofar, so I haven’t provided any easy interface how to set that up (if you ask really nicely I could still write about that here on the forums though…)

That should be not a problem at all. I have here a scene with three predator heads that give a total of 2.9M tris.

Looking at one of your earlier screens I see trees with foliage. If those are all separate mesh objects with relatively few vertices/faces per object that may be a problem. Perhaps you could share the file with me privately using Rhino - Upload to Support so that I could have a look and make some good suggestions on how to speed up the rendering (especially the startup) ?

Thanks, the file is on its way over.

Now that I’ve got it so that turning on Raytrace doesn’t take an age, I’m just trying to export a render using view capture to file.

I have the settings such that it can only use 2 of the 4 cores of my machine due to the problems I was having before.

It is, however, taking an age to export even a low res image. It is about 1000x650 (I think) and it has been going for 10+ mins and only 60% complete. Set to 500 cycles. Seems very slow still.

That sounds indeed slow. I’ll be able to say something intelligent about it once I have received your file.

FWIW, I also use Raytraced on the CPU, with only 2 of the 4 cores in use.

Also, thanks for the info on GPU. If I get some of these issues ironed out, I may get an eGPU. Been looking at either an RX580/590 or Vega 56.

Would rather not spend ~£500 on something that doesn’t work though so if @Jeff or others can provide some more info on what has / is working for them that would be great.

Having got an image out of it, it seems like Cycles ignores some settings of materials. As you will probably see in the file, I have set the brick texture and the ground texture to have their opacity significantly reduced such that the material is more subtle. This works fine with the standard rhino renderer but not in Raytrace. See comparison images below.

Rhino Render

Raytrace / Cycles

EDIT: also, 7 minutes after the file stopped exporting, Rhino is still beach balling. It seems that prior to doing the view capture to file, the viewport completed its ‘preview’ raytrace render. I then waited for the export to finish and then following completing the export, it has decided to render the viewport again from scratch.

I don’t have the textures you used in your file. If you can use Save As and ensure textures are included (there is an option for that on the file dialog), then re-upload please.

Anyway, I’m seeing lots of performance problems with your file in Rendered, Artistic, Technical (no real lockup, but still several seconds - much better than 20-30 seconds for the other modes) - plain lockups when trying to select anything.

I’m investigating, poked @jeff about it as well.

Remember to press the Pause button at the bottom of the viewport (or use the TogglePausedActiveRealtimeViewport command), or just use a very low number of samples.

Thanks, yes I did forget to do that. However, you’d also hope that if it was absolutely necessary that Rhino might do it automatically when initiating a view capture to file. Certainly, redoing a render that has just been done twice (once low res, once not quite so low res) it does seem a bit unnecessary to have to then render it a third time.