Hi everyone. I design & make timber furniture and am looking for a render plugin for rhino. I have used maxwell in the past but did not find it particularly user friendly, in particular it was tricky to manipulate materials appear like realistic timber (e.g. representing end grain in a design to be built in solid timber) Has anyone had relevant experience to this? Am leaning towards v ray but am open minded!
Thank you!
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We use V-Ray a lot and actually used to use Maxwell back in the day. While V-Ray has come a long way in making it easy to use and also has a great selection of wood materials, they are still all texture based.
If you want to render wooden materials that are solid and have intricate shapes cut out and rounded surfaces and so on, you would be much better served using procedural wood materials.
Actually I think it’s pretty easy to do in Blender:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+procedural+wood
Of course it might take some fiddling to represent the exact wood grain you want, but it will give you true volumetric materials, which wood is in real life as well. Using textures and UV mapping can only get you so close and will usually work sufficiently for anything that is flat or boxy.
Thank you Armin, really helpful, I’ll look into procedural & blender as you suggest
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