Is there a way to make a mirror material in Rhino 5 Render ?
Hi Rachel - set Reflectivity to 100%, but:
- In rendered display modes only the environment will be reflected, no objects. Full rendering will show the full reflections.
- Light is not reflected from light sources.
- It may look flat and dead unless you have something to reflect into the objects from the environment or other objects.
-Pascal
Hi Pascal. I have just upgraded from Rhino 4 to Rhino 6. It is impressive. Looking forward to working on layouts shortly. In the meantime, I am searching for information on mirror material. I have followed your advice above and see the results as you have listed them. However, I am wondering whether there have been any improvements in this area from Rhino 5 to Rhino 6.
I also found an old thread which appears to provide a dynamic mirror in a render preview window, but it seems to require Neon. Is that still the status quo, and if so, where would I find a suitable version of Neon for Rhino 6?
Between the Rhino 5 interface and the non-English text, I cannot reproduce the effect of the link below.
https://grabcad.com/questions/how-to-render-a-surface-like-a-mirror-in-rhino-or-like-a-watersurface
Thank you for your help.
Hi - Neon is not available for Rhino 6. If you follow Pascal’s steps above, you will be able to see real-time reflections in the viewport if you switch to the built-in Raytraced display mode.
Hi Wim. Thank you. I have been trying that over the last 30 minutes and see that it is so. However, my old laptop gets hot enough to cook an egg when I fire up Raytraced. It takes over 30 minutes to complete.
To complete meaning to get to the default 1000 passes?
Have you tried setting your CPU as the rendering device? It might be faster than you GPU. Both the GPU and CPU are showing their age though…
The GT 555M is a Fermi-based card upstream Cycles (the raytracing engine powering Raytraced) already dropped support for this and older architectures, so probably best to already switch to CPU for Raytraced.
Thank you Jester. By Complete, I mean that it took over 30 minutes for the Completed message to display in the status bar. I have not changed the default from 1000 passes.
I am running it again at the moment with the CPU as the rendering device. As you can see below, it took 67 minutes, so I have switched back to GPU.
My laptop was at the high end when I bought it in 2011, but 7 years of service is 2 years more than I had anticipated. Time to replace it with better grunt. I am thinking about this HP…
https://h20386.www2.hp.com/AustraliaStore/Merch/Offer.aspx?p=business-laptops-zbook-x360
If I had something like that, could I reasonably expect Raytraced to operate in the same manner as Rendered in terms of panning around a perspective view, without screen freezing? At the moment, after Raytraced has completed, any panning seems to restart the Cycles process, with an effective screen freeze.
So that is a yes to my question 
You may want to try setting to a lower Samples count (under session settings in the second screenshot you posted), or even better, click the running counter in the right-hand corner of that HUD (the same bar where it eventually says Completed). You should be able to input a smaller number. Start with 100, then change until you think you have a number that gives you the results you want in most cases.
Anyway, regarding the HP you are thinking: I don’t have much experience with Quadro cards, especially not in laptops. But for Raytraced you want to look at the core config, for instance the Quadro P1000 has a core config of 640:40:32:5 (List of Nvidia graphics processing units - Wikipedia). It is that first number that matters a lot for Raytraced. A bigger number there means better interactivity. But even so, that card should do better than your GT 555M (either 144 or 96 unified cores, depending on the exact make). In my desktop I have a GTX 1060, it has 1280 cores, and quite nice.
Yes, that is the interactive raytracing mode. Changes to viewport or model trigger a rerender. With older hardware it can be a PITA 
Thank you Jester. Much appreciated. I set Samples to 50, which took 2 minutes. I bumped it to 100, which not surprisingly added another 2 minutes. Given the rerender when panning, Raytraced is a no go on this old beast. I will stick with Rendered until I get new hardware.
I will take your suggestions into my PC search criteria.