I’m not sure if you will Nathan, I’ve spend a lot of time explaining to you what needs to be shipped in a product, and what competing products are doing, but you guys don’t seem to get it. Or continue to play dumb. At this pint I don’t even know honestly.
I think what you got so wrong is that you are confusing building a rendering engine with providing a rendering solution to users. Just like in a car, an engine is a very important piece, but it will take you nowhere if you don’t design the entire car. And that car will be bought by no one unless it’s reliable, fun, easy, intuitive and an overall positive experience.
Going with the car metaphor I used an old car model asset I had laying around. And in just under 10 minutes I got from a file with no materials, lighting or any other rendering setup, other than parts split by layers with names that remind me what materials to assign, to this in Keyshot:
This is why it’s so fast to setup a scene:
Look at how fast it gives me result on a 4K monitor:
Only thinks I changes for thsi renderings above is setting up the backdrop to white, and playing with a bunch of environments until I got one that I likes. All very fast and responsive and allowing me to make appearance decision without disruption. I recorded it here:
Now let me show you the Cycles experience to see the contrast…
Started with same file imported into V6’s default template for large objects/millimeters.
The first time I set the viewport to raytraced all I got is a pure white rectangle. nothing ever showed up. I set it back to shaded mode, tries again and it started generating a preview very very slowly. So I needed to go back to shaded mode so my computer is responsive again to go and assign material. But this is what I find in the material tab:
So after going into the + sign in the materials tab journey I came up with this:
…I’m skipping the in-between and take you straight to the 4 minutes result:
You can see one bad material, and a very noisy rendering. Rotating the camera is futile because the viewport doesn’t even update. Here’s what happens:
Minimizing the viewport and restoring it now shows me a rendering of nothing. You can see it here:
You might have noticed that I only applied 1 material in Cycles, instead of the 41 in Keyshot. Well, I don’t see the point of even trying more materials when I have to go hunting blindly into windows, folders, the library continues to be absolutely pathetic and this is what it like to go and try to find one and assign it:
That took 1 min:41 seconds. It even selected a wheel and I was confused because I thought it was highlighted and I was waiting to unselect itself. it never did. I have to click away to unselect it, so maybe it’s more like 1min:20 sec
Undoing a material assignment also takes a long time, which you would have to do a lot in this case since most materials are not suitable. You do the math of how long it would take to assign 41 materials, and how shitty the experience would be. It’s just programmed torture.
Let me show you how it’s like assigning a tire material in Keyshot:
The same limitations of material library and assignment UI exists for choosing and previewing environments, backdrop options, and render quality settings. It’s all really bad, and I don’t think you guys at McNeel even grasp how bad this whole experience is, and probably you never will, given the track record in the 18 years that I have been using Rhino and 23 years using other products too.
So in summary: total waste of time.
And I wasted a beautiful Saturday afternoon just to show you, but unless you see someone in person using all these other products right next to yours, you will never know what you don’t know. I hope this is a start to get you out of a mental model and the current internal expectation at McNeel of what’s an acceptable product. Because this isn’t it.
G