Is there a way to save rendered Z buffer on the Mac?

[Mike_Lutz]

I want to save a z buffer render using Mac Rhino.

I understand I can do that with the ShowZBuffer followed by ViewCaptureToFile, but searching through the forums it seems there isn’t a good way to set your output resolution via that method.

Instead (on WinRhino) there seems to be a button in the render window for saving a ZBuffer image at high res.

I’ve dug around in MacRhino and thus far haven’t been able to find anything similar, anyone know where that might be? (or if its definitively unsupported/unavailable?)

[dan]

@Mike_Lutz

I understand I can do that with the ShowZBuffer followed by ViewCaptureToFile, but searching through the forums it seems there isn’t a good way to set your output resolution via that method.

Please try the dashed version of the command -ViewCaptureToFile (this is the scriptable version of the command). Once you specify the file name, you should be able to set the resolution. Sorry this is “less-than-discoverable” …it is something we are tuning up significantly for Rhino 6.

[Mike_Lutz]

Dan,

Thanks so much for the reply!

I’ve tried the command and I’m not quite sure how to get to the place where I can set the resolution, hopefully this will be visible in the included gif

[dan]

@Mike_Lutz

I’ve tried the command and I’m not quite sure how to get to the place where I can set the resolution, hopefully this will be visible in the included gif

Try hitting the “Browse” button, then save Test.png (or something) to your desktop…then next options screen should show some settings for resolution.

We have already made a lot of headway fixing this workflow for Rhino 6, but for lots of complicated reasons we’ve not yet been able to backward port this to Rhino 5 for Mac. I’m going to take another look at MR-1114 soon.

[Mike_Lutz]

Thanks again!

Your right about the process, using browse did pop up another set of settings after the file was set, the output though seems a bit odd. Here is the settings that popped up:

I tried setting the scale to 5 and here is the output I got:

The image should be smooth, the sharp lines in the image look like it reset the z brightness in different quadrants of the scaled image. Here is the image when I don’t change the scale:

Many thanks for the replies - I certainly understand that I might have to wait for this functionality but I’m very hearten by your feedback!

[wim (Wim Dekeyser)]

@Mike_Lutz

I certainly understand that I might have to wait for this functionality but I’m very hearten by your feedback!

Well… as far as I can tell, the workflow for saving viewport to bitmaps might have been changed for RH6 but that does not solve the issue with the tiling of the Z-buffer output.

Better use of viewport ZBuffer functionality please

Hi @Jarek, No control exists to adjust the physical near and far clipping planes…It’s been on the todo list for a long time but just hasn’t found its way to the top… However, I don’t believe this will fix any of the tiling seams…but maybe…won’t really know until it’s tried. I’ve already got in place a way to tell Rhino what the near and far values are (which was an attempt to fix the tiling seams), but it didn’t work. Apparently even having two adjacent viewports using the exact same near and …

[dan]

@wim

Well… as far as I can tell, the workflow for saving viewport to bitmaps might have been changed for RH6 but that does not solve the issue with the tiling of the Z-buffer output.

Agreed. Let me look into this a bit more and I’ll post again here.

[dan]

@wim

Well… as far as I can tell, the workflow for saving viewport to bitmaps might have been changed for RH6 but that does not solve the issue with the tiling of the Z-buffer output.

Sorry for the delayed reply here. It took me a little while to chase this one down. This is an issue that will not likely be fixed in Rhino 5 for Mac. We have this bug on our list for Rhino 6 (for both Windows and Mac) - RH-37442 - and we hope to get it fixed there as soon as we can. I wish I could deliver better news.

cc: @Mike_Lutz

[Mike_Lutz]

@dan thanks for looking that up!

Bummer to hear that its a major version issue, but I figured that might be the case when I asked.

Is there a public WIP build for 6 at this point?

Again, many thanks!

[wim (Wim Dekeyser)]

@Mike_Lutz

Is there a public WIP build for 6 at this point?

Only for the Windows platform for the time being.