Incidentally, I notice that your Arctic view is way smoother than I get. Is this due to a difference between Rhino 6 for windows vs for Mac? Or do you get a better quality image with better hardware? ie better GPU?
See screen shot below and note the graininess on my screenshot which doesn’t appear at all in yours.
Go to the Arctic Shadows options and crank up the shadow quality:
It’s not a very intuitive slider - it will hopefully get fixed in v7. Good luck!
-David
Thanks, do you know if Arctic mode would be speeded up / improved with a better GPU? I’ve cranked it up to the max but it’s still seemingly somewhat grainier than @Jeff 's images.
I’m aware that we are perhaps getting a bit off topic here. I’ve started a new thread.
Thanks, I did wonder if that was causing a problem. I guess I should have tried turning them off myself.
Do you have a suggestion for what to do rather than having so many point lights? Would a series of single long rectangular lights be more efficient?
The biggest issue right now is that point lights (omni-directional) cast shadows in all directions…and in order to do that in the display, it requires quite a bit of horsepower and multiple render passes per light.
Until I can figure out better ways to manage so many point lights in the display… I would try converting them all to linear lights…they’ll still produce shadows in Raytraced mode and standalone renders, but the display currently does not support shadow casting for linear light sources, and so all of the cycles being used to produce them for the point lights will be eliminated.
This type of situation was handled before by placing all of your light sources on a separate layer called something like “Interior Lighting”, and then hiding that layer so that they’er not used in the display… But then there’s an option to “Use lights on layers that are off” in the Render settings, so that the renderer would use them. Unfortunately, trying to do the same thing with the Raytraced mode doesn’t appear to work since it uses its own set of display attributes to also render to the display… @Nathan, if the real-time pipeline could somehow use the actual “Rendered” display mode settings (or at least the setting I mentioned above)…then we could turn light usage off in the display but still have Raytrace use them simply by placing them on different layers and then hiding them…something for @andy to think about I guess.
-Jeff
That is something the changequeue can do. Through that any integration would get that support for free.
Another question: is there a way to set Rhino to always open files not in Raytrace mode? I’m finding when I’ve accidentally saved and closed a file with a Raytrace viewport it can make reopening the file much slower (as per earlier discussions about performance). thanks
There currently is not a mechanism to do so, but I have a wish item on my list for this:
Another issue.
I’ve just tried to output this view through viewCaptureToFile:
Seemed to be starting fine in the viewport so expected it would produce a good image.
Sadly, after over half an hour, the file produced is this:
If you can give me a link, I’ll upload the file if you want to take a closer look.
That does not look very nice, no. I already earlier linked to the uploader, but here it is for completeness 
In these types of issues, it’s really helpful to get as much details as possible on what you did…
What were all of the capture settings (especially the sample/pass count)?
What was the final output resolution for the result?
What file format did you specify?
…
…
…that kind of stuff. Getting the file is a huge help…but then we need to make sure that we’re doing exactly what you’re doing with that file.
The thing to try is to start with a very small sample/pass count like 10… see if it works. If it does, go higher…keep going until it fails… that may tell us something.
Note: A major improvement (fix) was added to the latest version of MacRhino having to do with captures…for display mode captures and just large captures in general… I’m not sure if it’s in the current public release, I’ll try to confirm that today… but the problems you were/are having with large Arctic captures should now be fixed and working…so I’d be curious if you have the latest version and if the issues you had above with large Arctic mode captures are now fixed.
Thanks,
-Jeff
Hi Nathan
Thanks, I wasn’t sure if it was set up on a case specific basis. I’ll just use the same in the future.
Robin
Hi Jeff
I uploaded the actual output file so that should be full res and original format.
I think it was about 2100x1500. Format PNG with transparent background checked. 500 samples.
Will check out the arctic mode fix. Thanks for the heads up on that.
Robin
I’ve just tried in the latest beta (prompted me for an update when I loaded up earlier) and it appears to be working.
I’ve uploaded the file anyway.
That’s good news! Thanks for letting us know…
What about large captures of Arctic mode (and I guess Z-Buffer views)? Are those now working for you as well?
Thanks,
-Jeff
Hi Jeff
I haven’t tried yet, need to get something out but I’ll give it a go soon.
Incidentally, just stumbled across another bug. See video below. What happened was I loaded a file which had raytrace turned on for a viewport. I then paused raytrace, move the window and increased the size of the viewport. I changed the view. Then I unpaused raytrace and it started rendering the old view.
Only changing view to shaded and back again did it update to reflect the viewport size and saved view.
Robin
That indeed is a bug, and already on my list! Thanks for reminding me 
Hi @jeff
I’ve tried Arctic and it works wonderfully now.
Still having issues with the z-buffer though.
RGB:
Z-depth:
Robin
Hmmm… I thought the z-buffer was working before… Can you capture it at any resolution? Or does it start falling apart after a certain size?
Thanks,
-Jeff
