I’m running the last Rhino WIP release on a Clevo Laptop i7 4790k 4.4 Ghz, 32 Gb Ram
and Nvidia Quadro K3100M 4GB, and unfortunately i must admit that the Cycles render performance are
absolutely poor, both in terms of quality and render time.
I also own a commercial version of Thea Render and the difference is abyssal !!!
I can’t believe that a powerful and famous product like Rhino, is published with a rendering engine so weak !!
I hope that the development department do something to speed up implementation in this particular area.
Hi Andy,
You could check my post for a comparison between cycles and thea:
Regarding workflow, please have a look below on my early 1 million trees render tests with rhino and thea (i used a Macbook laptop with windows 10 for this) :
I would have to second Marco’s comment with regard to Keyshot and how effectively the scene rezzes up. Even with a sphere it takes quite a while in comparison but I don’t know what the underlying differences are so I can’t test it like for like.
I’m guessing that due to the fact Keyshot is using all 16 of my cores (actually 14 as I leave 2 free for other stuff) and it’s using HDRI instead of real sun lit environments etc could be the reason.
This isn’t a complaint but an opportunity to understand how it works… I’m loathe to ditch Keyshot as it’s so handy for quick shots and i’m not a visualiser per se - it’s not my passion but Keyshot with a little bit of knowledge is really powerful. I’d love not to have to invest in Keyshot 6.
At the moment i’m busy at work but i post here just 2 simple rendering tests.
They are only simple tests but I can assure you that not only the rendering results are not good
with Cycles, but also the viewport response is very slow.
The first image is form Rhino WIP with Cycles and standard rhino materials.
The second is from Rhino V5 with TheaRender rendering in viewport
The two scene setup differs for some parameters but both uses environemental mapping and illumination.
Both, were captured after 1 minute and 40 sec.
The third image is from Rhino WIP when i try to use a Glass Cycles material and assign it to the selected objects.
Well, compared to the previous “Renderer” in Rhino 5, Cycles is quite an improvement that I personally welcome - Check out what people do with Blender - it’s definitely capable.
I personally wait for the Grasshopper Nodes to be implemented before doing any further testing though.
It’s a beta after all…
With that said: There is a reason why Thea Render is my main renderer of choice for professional, photoreal work. With using GPU & CPU at the same time, a great but easy to use material system, perfect network rendering, a great factory library and a very good integration in Rhino, it’s a pleasure to use.
And it’s developers are very capable and passionate.
The price is very good too, especially when you count in network nodes that are just 49.- Euro a piece.
P.s. I’ve made some other little tests and the overall quality of Cycles renderings are too poor.
That is, the generated images are always too grainy, even with simple objects and materials
and giving to the renderer at least 2 minutes of time.
And i’m running on a i7 4790k 4.4 Ghz with Nidia Quadro 768 cuda cores.
In the same time my The Render produces much much better images!
For example, this simple image, rendered in Rhino V5 + Thea Render takes about 3 min,
and the quality is much better then the same attempt done with Cycles,
that remains always too grainy.
‘I’ve made some other little tests and the overall quality of Cycles renderings are too poor.’
The problem is more that you didn’t read what McNeel told you before downloading and installing: ‘Rhino WIP SHOULD NOT be used for mission-critical work as it may be unstable.’
