…renderings for a piece of sculpture developed for entourage in an architecture project, that I subsequently decided to work up to the point where I could fabricate it, if I had or wanted to do so. Actually, I really don’t want to do so, because the whole thing depends on interior framing of five steel rods, braced twice with steel plates at each “segment” and with the four outer rods describing a precise helix around the annular middle ring. So, with the supporting sprockets this thing just requires way too much precise steel work for anything I would ever see myself undertaking or commissioning.
But it was an interesting design and modeling experiment.
Incidentally, the “shattered” surfaces were created as SubD solids, which were converted to mesh objects using the QuadRemesh tool and then exported as OBJ files to another modeling program that includes a cell fracture tool (Blender). And then I reimported the shattered versions as new OBJ files back into Rhino to use as blocks, replacing the existing blocks containing the SubD original versions of the segments. It all worked, but since the cell fracture process requires even further-subdivided meshes and then creates multiple mesh objects from each original one, I found myself with a huge number of very-high-poly-count meshes embedded in my Rhino blocks.
And Rhino 8 didn’t like it, one bit. It really started to bog down and hang up. Even the Capture Viewport to File tool, which I used here in lieu of creating actual Rhino Renders, refused to generate images until I went through the model and erased every last bit of geometry (modeling aids and saved “alternates”) hidden on turned-off layers. So, if I ever do this sort of thing again, I need to (one way or another) minimize the mesh density of the objects re-imported from Blender. Or perhaps just send precisely-modified objects from Rhino to Blender (precision modeling in Blender seems a contradiction in terms) and leave them there for visualization, since Blender is more oriented to high-poly mesh manipulation and rendering than Rhino.
Would you be able to share the file with me (confidentially) using Rhino - Upload to Support (my email address prefilled). I’d like to see if there is anything I can do with the Rhino Render (and Raytraced viewport) here.
One thing to try on the re-imported objects is to rerun QuadRemesh to see if you can decrease the polygon count.
edit: alternative, try maybe Decimate modifier or similar approach to decrease polygons before exporting from Blender
I’ll upload that shortly, Nathan. Be warned: it’s a huge file.
Once the shattered object is back in Rhino, it’s a tedious task to QuadRemesh or otherwise reduce the polygon count, since each shattered object is now composed of hundreds of mesh objects. I think I might have more luck in Blender with its mesh decimation functions, prior to re-exporting the shattered object back to Rhino. (As always with Blender, that will probably require me to sit through multiple amateurish Youtube videos before I can understand the interface. Uggh!)
By the way, I also had problems with this model and trying to use Capture Viewport to File and the Monochrome viewport display mode. I wanted a simulated hard-line drawing, so I turned the shadows off in Display Options for Monochrome…and Capture Viewport just produced a blank white image with a single colored strip of pixels in the upper left quadrant. I discovered that if I turned shadows back on, but with all Shadow options set to the minimum performance and with Shadow Intensity at 0, Capture Viewport would grab what I saw on the screen. So Shadows had to be on for a successful viewport capture, even if the function was so minimized as to not produce any shadow effect on-screen.
Thanks! I sent you the model used for these renderings. I still have a backup copy of the earlier version, before I cleaned up the turned-off layers, which had even more pronounced issues with Capture Viewport functions and which would occasionally just bog down Rhino entirely. Let me know if you need that model too.
I’ll let you know. I’ll start investigating tomorrow though, today it’s already quite late, I’d better get to sleeping
edit: I did have a quick peek. ViewCaptureToClipboard using monochrome after opening the file without making any other changes appeared to be working. Are you capturing as is, or are you giving larger resolutions or scale maybe?
I set the Viewport Capture so that the short axis of the output image was 3500 pixels (so something like 6k x 3.5k pixels total), and I kept the scale at 1.
On the Mac when I input a different resolution I get in the top left corner some of the lines that are in the drawing, but much is missing.
On Windows I did a 9906x6000 capture, and that worked just fine. On the Mac it was more troublesome, getting larger captures out to clipboard failed. Logged that RH-79996 ViewCaptureToClipboard doesn’t put result in clipboard
Thanks for following up on this. For what it’s worth, I mainly use the Viewport Capture to File as opposed to Clipboard. I did try the Clipboard variation, and it didn’t work either, at least with the file with which I was having trouble.
Now the file you have is the one I cleaned up and that largely “worked” once I I bought down the file size. Did you want the original larger file which was more likely to fail at Viewport Capture? I probably also have the failed captured images themselves, still in the Windows recycle bin.
Well, in our line of work the more info we can get, especially failed results, the better we can investigate. If it is not too much of a bother please zip up any files you think may be relevant, 3dm files, failed renderings and captures. You can use the same link as before for uploading.
I uploaded the large version of the model that caused me problems with viewport capture, as well as some images that it produced while supposedly capturing the viewports (usually blank except for a stripe of color, or with just part of the viewport captured and not the whole image on my screen). Before I sent you the files, I confirmed that the issue is still happening with this particular model file, since some system and video card driver updates were pushed through yesterday. Yes, it still happens, although not with the cleaned up version of the model that I sent you earlier.
