Rendering and Material Improvements(?) in Rhino

Andy, I’ll have a look, and get back to you.

Ian

Unfortunately, the library as it is right now is pretty poor. Maybe I’ve just randomly picked the bad ones, but here’s an example:

What Rhino’s looks like (cos it only has a base color map, no normal, spec/gloss etc maps):

And here’s what a good material looks like (This is Substance Designer, but it looks the same in Unreal Engine/Unity. Its not raytraced, this is OpenGL):

(And to be fair, I used the same EXR environment for both)

Another example of how I find the Rhino library lacking … Here is an image of 2 main types of glass used in the real world. Standard and low-iron (or superclear). Both are slightly green, low-iron is a lot clearer though.

The Rhino glass library has a whole bunch of glass colors that I’m not sure you can actually buy anywhere, but I can’t see a slightly green standard glass. The polished clear glass is way too clear, and they aren’t volumetric neither.

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The green is a bit off, but this Cycles Disney BRDF is making life so much easier. I’ve never been able to get such a realistic glass so easily before:

FYI, the glass that I currently have on my machine (but not yet merged into Rhino WIP) is much closer to the glasses you mention, as Rhino basic glass material. It isn’t the Disney BRDF, but comes quite close IMO.

/Nathan

@nathanletwory,

i still have that litle problem with the built in metal material. If i choose it it crashes Rhino but no error dialog comes up (and no autosave file is created to revert too). It would be great if this can be fixed.

c.

I am still on holiday, so no fixes have been made since. It will be probably another week before I get back, so patience :slight_smile:

/Nathan

@nathanletwory, thanks and happy holidays :slight_smile:

c.

Here’s one from me Brian, also this belongs to rendering and material handling…
Since V5 Rhino offers a UV Editor which lacks the most fundamental functionality of such a tool…that applies in particular to any 3d package which offers rendering but no native texture editing or 3D-painting:

That is Export of the UV-Mesh to Image Editors.
At this stage the UV-Editor is kind of like a can of Soda without a pull…How may one access what if offers?

I personally rarely do texture work directly inside Rhino but I once recorded a tutorial and wrote a very crude Macro which brings stuff to Photoshop as shown in the animated gif. Individual mesh islands get random colours assigned: That way one may quickly mask and distribute part of the model to layers. It can not be hard to add this functionality as a proper command.

In case you are unsure as to why bringing flat UV meshes to Image Editors may at all be useful please watch the Youtube clip linked above.

Edit: The screen recording looked good but the resulting animated gif could have caused epileptic seizures, exchanged. Here’s btw. a Discourse discussion by users who miss that feature too…

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Holger

Thanks - this is now on David’s list.

  • Andy

Nice! Just in case there’s another line free on that list…
You allow for any number of stacked UV sets with primitive based projections. But there’s just one manually 2D edited UV-set allowed. Could one possibly change that easily?

Say I’d like to max out the texure space with a custom designed fuselage texture for my little plane. I’d then scale the respective 2D mesh islands up, so that they have highest possible resolution at the given texture size. The remaining parts of the 2D mesh I’d collapse to a point or move them out of the way (i.e.parameter space) and set them to “do not repeat”. Then one would possibly like to have a second, similar UV-layer but this time with the jet engine as the main part and the remaining bits of the 2D mesh not appearing in the texture.

All this at this point would get controlled with separate mapping channels – but it was of course way more powerful to address separate materials with each of these layers of UV-projectors… I guess that’s a bit more work though?

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Request added! https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-35060

I would also want to +1 on a good material library being half the cake.
It speeds up work extremely if you have a silver object, slap a silver preset on it and it really looks like silver right away.
Many materials in a scene can be used directly from a well sorted library and only the hero materials usually need deeper finetuning, which could be solved by supporting for instance substances (Allegorithmic is even willing to help with this in my experience).

My renderer of choice for Rhino is Thea Render and they constantly improve and extend their library, recently with a wide range of structured plastic surfaces. It is a very nice feel for users if you get regular updates like that, I’m sure Rhino users would enjoy that too. And by building it up over time, you can put quality over quantity.

The Blender Artist forums show what Cycles is capable of and I’m sure that Grasshopper nodes will open up a lot of possibilities other ways of texturing don’t offer (especially if you want to go outside the purely realistic looks).

What I personally would love (and what I miss in Blender) is the ability to easily code custom shaders as plugins. There are things only procedurals can do, like wood that is volumetric throughout the object, non-repeating noises etc.
So having an API for shadernodes would be one of my biggest wishes for Rhino Cycles.

This is a wood shader I wrote in 2004 for messiah:studio:

The branches are actually attractors that you are able to position and arrange to your liking and even animate.
I hope the shader nodes in GH will have multiple outputs - this shader for instance has a separate output for the grain, so you could only bump those if you wanted.

Cheers,

Tom

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Tom i think that now proper toolset for uv editing will be enough :slight_smile:

Was there any update for uvs so far ? Because using current uv editor is at least painful if not worse …

Hi D-W, unfortunately I don’t have anything new for you. Lately only bug fixes related to UV editing.

Is there a trick to getting previews for the RMTL files? I’m shooting in the dark over here!

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Hi Ernst

It’s fairly easy on Windows to destroy the file associations that Rhino sets up in the installer. Try running this command inside Rhino, and then restarting Windows.

TestRestoreLibraryFileAssociations

It won’t auto-complete, so you’ll have to copy and paste it in.

  • Andy
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Worked like a charm. Thanks Andy!