This is for a university project one year ago. While the engine is not going to replace any 3rd party rendering engine soon, it’s still very impressive what Rhino can do on its’ own.
what would you wish cycles could do better or what is missing?
It’s not so much major features but comparing to the granular control Blender’s cycles gives you the difference is a bit stark. If I had to give bullet points of the things that I can think of immediately:
- Better colorspace (ACES would be great, but that’s a bit of a stretch)
- Render passes (shadows, reflections, etc)
- More granular texture control (such as material blending)
- Samples control (why do I get only 4 presets? If I want to put my samples at 350 I think I should be able to)
There are obviously more, but this is what I could think of now.
i believe @nathanletwory has quite a project cooking for Cycles for the next version of Rhino which probably will improve most if not all of your points, not fully sure about render passes though would be great indeed. maybe he can share at least some guesstimate when there might be something to test and play?
Rhino 8 Cycles was, in my opinion, a big improvement from Rhino 7 Cycles, so if they can pack some QoL improvements that’d be great.
I’ve not had a reason to check on the native render settings for a while, but that’s actually quite interesting, especially the passes for material/object id’s.
It looks like you can set the samples to a specific number with an override check box at the bottom of the menu?
Is there a rhino-native answer to triplanar mapping and texture randomisations?
Sample count you an already change since Rhino 7. In Rhino 8 check in the advanced render settings section in the Rendering panel. There you can also set different bounce counts. Additionally you can check a couple of render passes, most interesting material ID and object ID.
There is no triplanar mapping, nor texture randomisations at this point.