I’m the render guy in my office so I have Flamingo installed but not many others in the office do. I’ll have a modeler send me a model for rendering, I’ll spend time setting up all the materials (usually first by importing a standard set from a directory), create a set of renders, and then save and close the file.
But then a modeler may have changes to make, so they go in, open the file, make changes (sometimes importing Acad lines or other Rhino objects), save the file and then pass back to me for new renders.
The thing is, a lot of the time it totally wrecks the file for me. Like the materials are all hyper shiny and weird and for some reason I can’t change them back. Or there are many versions of the same material in there… A lot of the time it’s faster for me to delete all materials, re-import from an older version, resign to all the layers, etc. It’s ugly and super annoying.
Has anyone else experienced this? Do I need to get Flamingo installed on all machines perhaps??
OK I’ve spent a day poking around with the built-in renderer in 7. All my rendering work are 24-40 meter tugboats and other ships around that size. All using sunlight only and mostly floating in space. I threw together a very simple test file.
It seems to me like many of the material and environment settings available in Flamingo just don’t exist in the built-in. The sun properties doesn’t even have cloudiness setting to fuzz out the harsh shadow!
I did make a few tweaks: added 0.01 thickness to glass surface, since we don’t have a thin glass material just yet. The tint of the glass material lightened quite a bit, since the color set is quite dark. In skylight just a basic environment with just white color set.
Tomorrow I’ll be landing a change to Raytraced/Rhino Render where one can play with the shadow intensity (and it actually does something). You could then add one or more lights and set their shadow intensity very low. That way you still get the lighting, but shadows may be almost imperceptible.
On my machine with that change I could add a directional light (which is a sun really) and set its shadow intensity to say 33%. Along with the white skylight from my previous render you’d get something like this
I don’t think we’ll get access to shadow intensity of the sun any time soon, so using a directional light is pretty much the same - just a bit more cumbersome to control than the sun dialog (:
Attaching the file for this, but it won’t work the same until you get a public Rhino 7.7. The Rhino 7.7 service release candidate will most likely be available after the second Tuesday of May:
If you happen to have two Nvidia GPUs in your machine you should be able to use them both also in the future Rhino 7.7 (check the Raytraced HUD in my screenshot in this post…)
Yeah I think you will get some good results a lot faster in V7 compared to Flamingo, and you eliminate dependencies to having the plugin installed. Also make sure you compare the Renderer vs. The Raytrace more (right-click on the viewport name). They are slightly different engines/results. Raytrace mode uses Cycles engine, and Nathan has been working on that a lot.
It would be a good test to see what that tugboat (which looks awesome BTW) render looks like in V7 using the default render vs. Viewport Raytrace mode.
BTW, I don’t use any on them, we use external plugins, for our own insufferable reasons, but I think what they are doing here without plugins is coming along quite well.
So Thea seems to have been bought out by Altair since 2.0. I was very happy with Thea but after spending the whole weekend I am very disappointed with the whole Altair thing. I was ready to upgrade but Altair has gone to a subscription mode and I see very little that they have added to what was a great renderer. I went to their support for the install and it seems like I am not the only one disappointed. I’ve been happy with the efforts of Nathan with Cycles and will probably pass on Thea 3.0 unless you can enlighten us foriegner on just what is so amazing and powerful about the new Thea 3.0. Nothing from your renders above impresses me. The OP’s efforts in Flamingo are very nice considering how long Flamingo has been around.
In my renders just did a fast render only plan with water material and play with Environment with HDRI.
Here you can find what’s new in Thea Render V 3.0 for Rhino.
This was my first efforts using the Cycles render in Rhino7 just a couple of months ago. Like I said I got excited to see Thea Render for Rhino V3 and have been through all the vids including the one you posted here. I started a separate thread here a couple weeks ago trying to get feedback about Thea For Rhino V3 and got absolutely zero response. I downloaded the trial for V3 and went through an absurd licensing scheme via Altair only to find it was not truly a trial and Altair has pretty much ruined Thea for me although I still do have my 2.0 license. Are you affiliated with Thea foreigner?
