Rendering jewellery questions

[Akash]

It’s past time that I must put together a bit of a portfolio, and I’m being held back [not just, but mostly] by the lack of quality renders.

Years of working on a very old computer meant that I only did basic renders, and didn’t really learn how to properly render jewellery, beyond small modification of default settings.
I used Keyshot Pro 10. with the jewellery preset they have built in. it does a fairly good job on gemstones,[ the stones looked good, but synthetic,] but I never managed to get the gold to look even remotely similar to the hand burnish finish I do on the physical jewellery…
Not to mentions learning how to do good lighting and composition.

Now with a new laptop, albeit a Mac, so no great Nvidia card and no Vray option…
but plenty of GPU VRAM and fantastic display [to scrutinies the quality to the renders]
I can finally start to properly learn rendering jewellery.

So the question is two folds; Which render solution to go for? and learn
[ this is specifically for jewellery, so unfortunately Rhino render as far as I understood, can not compute some of the necessary aspects of gemstones rendering]

The other part of the question is about recommendation for good jewellery rendering tutorials
What I found on the web was for very generic commercial look…

My goal is to try and achieve the look the jewelry will have after it went through the long hand finishing, setting and engraving/chasing work that I [also] do.
I guess that includes adding details that are too small for the model that goes to the printing+casting house. So it would seems like I must make version of the models specifically for rendering…

I tried to render in Blender, it’s complicated, overwhelming, but very interesting.
Found some very nice gold material created by power users… but even with very complex diamond material that people shared I could not get even close to a real diamond look.

I will not go back to Keyshot.

Bella is an option…? but no GPU yet [I think]… does it make sense to do drafts and setups in rhino render, and just use Bella for final output?
Is there a way to bring these parametric materials from blender into Bella?
I had some limited experience with Substance, but creating materials feels way over my head,
I could not find the right kind of gold in Substances library.

Would greatly appreciate suggestions and information on how to move forward with this rendering challenge.

thanks a lot
Akash

[David53 (David)]

There are a few of us here that use bella.

Actually, in reality, bella has an unlicensed and watermarked mode, that you can use.

Support is second to none, and so far, it has been nothing short of fantastic for me.

Many of the bella “quick” materials and nicely generalised dielectric/conductor materials negate the need for complex stacks in many cases. There are some jewellery cases both on the website and here.

I was also very tempted by vray, which remains excellent, but several recent changes to its licence model made me disgruntled. It’s GPU rendering is unbelievably lighting fast in Vantage, I really was amazed. If you can tolerate CPU, what about Corona? Though, that will also follow the general new Chaos license model, leaving a very bad taste for me.

In the meantime, there are renders in the gallery here tagged with “bella”, so you can see the variation and potential output. There are also plenty of example files on the main website for use. There is a specific ring example that you can download for Rhino and use right away.

Hope that helps!

[Akash]

thank @David53

I tried the ring model from Bella website, it looks like the Platinum material [at least] needs an update, I tested on the WIP8, the ring file is R6. At least it doesn’t render nicely out of the box, and I would need to first learn how to use Bella before being able to test on this model.

Will an approach in which all the rendering setup and settings are done in Rhino Render fast on the GPU, and then just moving to Bella for final [slow] hi quality render. is this a reasonable option?

thanks a lot
akash

[jdhill]

I have just confirmed those example files to be working with the current Bella 23.4 and current Rhino 8, so please ensure you are running 23.4, since older versions will not be able to handle the files correctly

regarding the question of mixing Cycles (Rhino Raytrace/Render) with Bella for previz/production, for a professional result this will usually not be a good strategy, since although Bella does do what it can to automatically translate Rhino materials, you need to make use of Bella’s specific features (complex IOR for metals/gems, auto-boolean, real-world light values, etc), and you cannot set those parameters in a Rhino material

conversely, if you use Bella materials, the plugin provides Rhino with some representation of them, but this is limited, since it is likewise not possible to translate all Bella material parameters to Rhino ones

so a potentially useful workflow might involve the use of Snapshots to manage switching the model between different material assignments, along with saving materials to the Rhino material library once they have been set up how you wish, so that it is quicker & easier to get a new scene ready for rendering

[Akash]

Thank you @jdhill

I was indeed on 23.3, so I went to the website and downloaded the current build.
Rhino say it is still 23.3 [did a Rhino restart]. Where do I find 23.4?
I downloaded from here

Regarding your kind explanation about the limits of inter-operability with Rhino render.
I think I understand in general terms, I’ll have to first learn Bella [and Rhino Render] to understand why for example, materials are not interchangeable, or why RR doesn’t have real light values…? [in Blender Cycle light are in W… [perhaps that’s not the same as real lumen ]

As one that is not a fast learner, I need to make a choice which Render to learn.
I must say that the current lack of GPU support makes me somewhat hesitant about diving into the learning curve required to use Bella.
I was reading your comments [in Discord] about not wanting to bring GPU before it is fully ready and supports all features… But wouldn’t it be great to have just basic features on the GPU just for Drafts and basic setups… and then before approaching final render, one would switch to CPU to tweak the settings to production quality …?

I’ve been following the development of Bella from afar for a long time. With high appreciation and interest, while my computer was too old to put any real effort into rendering with it.
Now with a new Mac, I’m hesitant… [but also would be happy to be convinced]

With best regards and thanks
akash

[jdhill]

looks like those links were outdated, I have now changed them to point to the downloads page

regarding materials, the plugin does try to do what it can, for example translating Rhino “gem” material to something in bella which has dispersion enabled, and so forth, but you just do not have much control, given that the “gem” material has literally no parameters beyond the type

I do not know how rhino translates lights internally to cycles, but it does not seem to be in any physical way, since you can scale a scene by 0.001 and the lighting does not change; my assumption would be that it has been designed to mimic the behavior of prior versions of rhino render

regarding gpu, when I say that I do not mean it like we have a list of features that get checked off, and we wait til they are all finished to enable them all at once – we would never do that. I more mean that they will all come together at the same time, as a consequence of the design being done in a proper way

a more likely “progressive” release of gpu, at this point, seems to be that different brands of gpu will be able to be supported before others, and here I agree with you that there is no sense in making anyone wait artificially; however being on mac this is probably not good news for you, since it is an easy guess that mac will end up being the most difficult

but that is all discussion of the future, and you should not choose what to use based on it – our development is always explicitly “ready when it is ready” and you should only choose based on what the tools are able to do for you at the current moment; this is why we make bella very easy to try, with no time limit

[Akash]

Thank you @jdhill

There’s still seems to be an issue here with the Platinum in the ring sample scene. [updated to 23.4]
Maybe it’s a Mac bug…? the metal is black,

And then I got this :

600 GB of memory [600GB] Rhino took to render this scene.
I had to force quit Rhino so the computer won’t collapse .
Maybe best to send this scene to @stevebaer

Steps: 1) open the ring [light background] file in the WIP,
2) save as a V8 file.
3) let it render, [only modification was to enable the Intel Denoise]. On a maximized viewport in full screen using side car [iPad Pro M2 12.9’ 2022]
4) renders progress normal… but slow down a lot in the last few %
5) at 99.something% I get the out of memory massage in the attached screenshot.

system info:

Summary

Rhino 8 SR0 2023-7-25 (Rhino WIP, 8.0.23206.14396, Git hash:master @ 1e9fadf24e2aade96dde6e2eafa110f6c1e80245)
License type: Commercial, build 2023-07-25
License details: Cloud Zoo
Expires on: 2023-09-08

Apple macOS Version 13.4.1 (c) (Build 22F770820d) (Physical RAM: 96Gb)
Mac Model Identifier: Mac14,6
Language: en-TH (MacOS default)

Apple M2 Max (OpenGL ver:4.1 Metal - 83.1)

OpenGL Settings
Safe mode: Off
Use accelerated hardware modes: On
Redraw scene when viewports are exposed: On

Anti-alias mode: 4x
Mip Map Filtering: Linear
Anisotropic Filtering Mode: High

Vendor Name: Apple
Render version: 4.1
Shading Language: 4.10
Maximum Texture size: 16384 x 16384
Z-Buffer depth: n/a
Maximum Viewport size: 16384 x 16384
Total Video Memory: 72 GB
Graphics: Apple M2 Max
Displays: Unknown (255dpi 2x), Unknown (264dpi 2x)

Metal GPU Family Apple 7
Metal GPU Family Common 3
Metal GPU Family Mac 2
Graphics processors
Apple M2 Max
Color LCD (1728 x 1117 @ 120.00Hz)
Sidecar Display (1366 x 1024 @ 60.00Hz)

USB devices
Generic: USB3.0 Card Reader
VLI Inc.: USB 2.0 BILLBOARD
Wacom Co.,Ltd.: Wacom Intuos Pro M
3Dconnexion: SpaceMouse Enterprise
VIA Labs, Inc. : USB Billboard Device

Bluetooth devices
None

Third party kernel extensions
None

Third party plugins
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Rhino plugins that do not ship with Rhino
/Users/akashlotan/Library/Application Support/McNeel/Rhinoceros/MacPlugIns/bella_rhino.rhp “Bella” 23.4.0.0
/Users/akashlotan/Library/Application Support/McNeel/Rhinoceros/packages/8.0/IntelDenoiser/0.6.7/IntelDenoiser.Mac.rhp “IntelDenoiser.Mac” 1.0.0.0

Rhino plugins that ship with Rhino
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/Applications/RhinoWIP.app/Contents/PlugIns/SectionTools.rhp “SectionTools” 8.0.23206.1002
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ring-brushed-light-bg.3dm (12.5 MB)

thanks a lot
Akash

[jdhill]

here is how that file is rendering on my m1 mini:

if bella is set as the current renderer, it should not be possible to enable rhino’s intel denoiser; bella already has intel’s denoiser inside of it, and can do a better job than if you try to use rhino’s intel denoiser plugin

you can enable the denoiser for the viewport by clicking the “(click here for IPR settings)” in the bar at the bottom of the viewport, or for the production render, in the Render panel > Output & Solver (this is only visible when bella is the current renderer)

I do not see any suspicious memory usage here yet (around 2.2gb), so I will suggest trying this without rhino’s intel denoiser and see if that makes a difference

[Akash]

I guess something is wrong in my system then…?
The memory get bigger and bigger every few seconds [I stoped the render at this point at 54%]
[before it was not set to Bella [but it was Bella in the viewport]

now I set it to Bella and it looks better but still black metal and crazy memory usage

[jdhill]

the rhino denoiser may still be enabled, you may need to switch back to rhino render, disable it, and then switch to bella again (I don’t have any control over that)

[jdhill]

yeah now I have installed the rhino intel denoiser and I can see constantly climbing memory usage, as well as multiple crashes

[Akash]

Ok thanks I’ll try, now I tried to close the model and it is stuck with 460Gb memory used… [forced quit it and sent the report to Mcneel]

Yes I didn’t look for the denoise option it’s probably is still on… not even sure where it is…
but if that is what create this hug memory loop, then it looks like a bit of a big conflict bug between Bella and rhino render…
[it’s 2am here, I can test more tomorrow if needed.]

thanks a lot for your time and help

[jdhill]

rhino’s intel denoiser is added/enabled in the viewport properties > post effects panel

it should not be possible for there to be any conflict, since the two (bella & rhino’s intel denoiser) are unrelated; if you enable that denoiser, then rhino passes the image pixels to it to be denoised, regardless which renderer has produced them

here, I am having trouble even enabling it on a cycles raytraced viewport for testing, since it just crashes rhino (Version 8 WIP (8.0.23206.14396, 2023-07-25), using the file posted further up the thread)