Hi Paul @pkinnane
A quick note of appreciation — the underlying render quality is impressive and the new AI denoiser is excellent, I have no complaints there at all and I think the engine produces really nice clean images.
For a bit of context my background is in 3ds Max with Mental Ray, V-Ray, Corona and FStorm but I’ve picked up Rhino and Octane over the past 18 months in a new role so the points below are very much my own findings and frustrations coming to the plugin fresh from those tools. To be clear, they’re about features and the day-to-day workflow and interactivity that feel a bit dated, not the render quality and I appreciate Rhino’s own architecture may limit what’s possible. Firstly, is there a roadmap available or could you provide any sense of what’s planned for upcoming releases?
If it’s useful, these are the features that would make the biggest difference:
- Frame buffer parity with the Max plugin / standalone: tone mapping panel, mouse-wheel zoom, render history / A-B compare, and saving all passes as TIFF, PNG or JPEG rather than EXR-only.
- A proper Octane camera with its own linked tone mapping (so we’re not limited by global tone mapping for all views), plus safe frames / a reliable viewport-to-output match (I currently lock a 16:9 floating window to avoid camera drift).
- Materials: a node editor or node-graph update (named connectors, preview window), much faster material preview, a light mixer and decals like Corona, a material converter that doesn’t drop map links.
- Viewport interactivity: material/map preview with a selectable channel (diffuse/normal/reflection), material-select from the viewport, and full-size texture map preview inside Rhino.
- Proper lights with targets (not just emitters), and 3D IES rotation rather than only in map settings.
- A higher poly limit — 8M is a steep drop when equivalent FStorm scenes in Max handle 500M+, even a billion.
- Stop Octane from deleting missing texture links (this one is particularly problematic and has rendered some old scenes useless).
Happy to expand on any of these and thanks for the work on the plugin!