Hey everyone,
I’ve been wrestling with something that I suspect other Rhino users coming from (or occasionally envying) SketchUp have felt too.
In SketchUp, you can slap a texture on a face and it shows up immediately in the viewport — no rendering engine, no material setup ritual, just instant visual feedback. It’s dumb-simple, but for design communication and quick client walkthroughs it’s genuinely powerful.
In Rhino, the situation is more fragmented:
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Shaded mode shows layer colors. Clean, fast, but no textures.
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Rendered mode (or Raytraced) does show materials and textures, but it’s heavier, and depending on your scene it can be sluggish on complex geometry. It also feels like overkill when all I want is a fast “painted model” look for presentation - especially setting the mapping…
What I’m looking for is something in between — a viewport mode that:
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Displays diffuse textures on surfaces in real time
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Stays fast and interactive (not raytraced)
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Ideally with some ambient occlusion or a subtle shadow caster so the model reads well
My questions for the community:
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Has anyone built a custom display mode that mimics SketchUp’s textured shading? If so, are you willing to share the
.iniexport? -
Is there a combination of settings in the Display Modes panel (Rhino Options → View → Display Modes) that gets close? I know you can toggle “Show textures” in Shaded or create a custom mode derived from it — has anyone actually tuned this to a satisfying result?
My setup: Rhino 8, Windows 11, NVIDIA GPU. I work primarily in architecture (residential + public projects), so the typical use case is a massing model with materials I want to visualize quickly before committing to a full render.
Appreciate any .ini files, screenshots, or workflow tips. If there’s enough interest, it’d be great to compile a community-made “SketchUp-feel” display mode preset.
Thanks
