We hear you. We dropped V-ray and any rendering work in Rhino a few years ago. We realized that between the instability of Vray, Octane for Rhino, and all the shortcomings of a rendering/materials workflow inside Rhino we were wasting too much time, fluidity and even mental health. It was one of our best workflow decisions we ever made. It sucked at first, it was painful, but worthy in the long term.
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We use Rhino to make really good screenshots and anything beyond that goes to Blender (when we need highest quality we use Octane inside Blender). This is why I think a Rhino-Blender bridge/live link would be very beneficial.
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We use Rhino exclusively for industrial design/modeling and planning any physical fabrication or manufacturing. It’s all nurbs-based work, or a combination of Nurbs detailing over imported SubDs modeled in Blender, or imported assemblies from Solidworks/Creo that need a more direct design evolution, with bigger design changes that can only happen in Rhino, and the parametric side gets in the way. Rhino is just the perfect tool for this.
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G
The amount of rendering options available right now is really exploding. It’s getting super-competitive. I’m learning Twinmotion and D5. Neither are really replacements for V-Ray being more geared towards real-time rendering. Both are still impressive though.
I’ve REALLY been struggling too but I’m figuring it out. Slowly. The level of quality I’m aiming for might be a little below yours. And it’s taken a lot of time.
Sorry for continuing this little off topic but if you
for whatever reason don’t want to use Cycles and are looking for the very high quality renderings done with plugin for Rhino, and developers who understands Rhino and put much effort into integrating it with, try Bella. For companies like Chaosgroup, Rhino is far from being priority and this is not something particullary bad, it’s just not their main DCC to focus on and never will be.
Bella tries the best to use native Rhino materials and other way around, present their materials as an OpenGL mats in the Rendered mode. As for a plugin it’s deeply integrated with Rhino with good and bad parts about that.
That said, Blender will always be better for the rendering than Rhino, but going there has its costs in terms of more complicated workflow (it pays off once you are inside). The good thing is, Bella is being integrated with Blender too. Either you choose Bella or Cycles, there are devs who understands both programs and further development that would make connection between the two more streamlined would be very beneficial for the Rhino community. It would also took some pressure of Rhino devs who are trying to provide tools common in mesh programs but have dozens of times less manpower to do that. Actually, I would expect more novelty in that area because having NURBs objects as a basis for the meshes should create opportunities - but I can’t wait for the novelty if more basic things can be cumbersome inside Rhino and can’t be really delegated outside.
Gustavo already successfully “escaped” from Rhino with parts of the work and his opinion about focusing on making Rhino more robust instead of adding features that might not work that well even after a year from the official release is very understandable. Feeling of being trapped inside program that potentially has features but they are buggy is very miserable. If there are easy ways to move with work from Rhino to other programs and back, then all unfinished things are much more tolerable - except we are talking about the GUI or stuff like that.
For example I would not care that much about the UV mapping in Rhino if there would be some Rizom UV live link, but that’s just wishful thinking.
I started a new post about rendering it would almost be worth copying your post word for word and posting there.
I started typing out a big long reply and realized ya I’m pulling things a little off topic. The rendering issues are one thing preventing me from getting more mileage out of Rhino so perhaps barely within the borders of the original post.
Admins, can we please split this topic?
I’d like to give some feedback to @keithscadservices @Czaja and also touch about the excellent Bella rendering plugin, but we are getting too offtopic.
THX!
I’ve been using V-Ray as a professional 3D visualizer almost daily for almost 18 years now and the integration with Rhino is very very extensive, the plugin is rocksolid and the quality is great.
Well, for 3dsmax the feature list is a bit longer. But is there a better built-in render plugin for Rhino?
I am very grateful to Chaosgroup for this render plugin. It is very universal and delivers stable results under the pressure of tight deadlines.
thanks for the topic split @Gijs!
I think you need to keep my comments about quality and expectations for rendering in context: I have a 16-person team, and we have people in our team who do rendering and visualization work exclusively, and that work requires a lot of animation, fluid dynamics, and lots of esoteric shit that’s more part of a VFX workflow than a design visualization workflow. Once that’s in place and maintained within our team, the rest of us can use those same tools, presets, and libraries and even get their help to improve the quality of our viz work daily. This is why I do not miss the one-man-band style of work, I’m not sure if I could go back.
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For people doing static renderings, and mostly about hard products Rhino + plugins is a pretty viable option.
I think that if I were doing any rendering work in Rhino, Bella would probably be the option I’d use, if it run on GPU, or had comparable rendering speeds to a GPU renderer. I think the’ll get there soon if they haven’t already.
I didn’t know this. We might have to look into Bella as a replacement for Octane for Blender at some point. We like the quality of Octane, but we do not like a much its stability and integration.
I don’t know how much of our bad experience with Vrya was caused by Vray or by Rhino, but it was always related to animation. We ended up in situations several times where Vray support just could not help us, and that’s when we decided to pull the plug.
G
Worth noting: Bella is on sale right now. And a good sale not like 2% off.
Actually, it is a bit different.
Bella now has a default cost of 240€ for a perpetual license (all updates included for +1 year after the date of purchase).
It used to be 500€ with a 50% discount if you renewed at the point of the 1-year ending, and then 25% if you renewed within the second year. It is important to make clear (with all of the recent new subscription models) that bella does not have a subscription model, the refresh cost allows you to access to updates beyond the first (or nth year usage). Otherwise, it is yours to keep.
All in all, it is now cheaper.
Hi,
I create architectural visualization and use Rino 8 to develope the 3d Model. Last weeks i installed Visualarq to do this.
The first step is to define the material that will be use by styles as walls, slabs and so on. I have spend many time to make a brick material for walls. The great problem is that the bump map in rhino not really work.
I use Twinmotion withe the sync plugin an have seen that the rhino created material rendered in rhino will be flat. After sync to twinmotion the rhino material rendered in twinmotion very different with big bump.
I think the best way for the future is to use Renderer like Twinmotion and Blender. Both Renderer are free and the Rendering is very high quality.
8k maps in Rhino is the badest way that can make. I think rendering in Rhino is in my eyes good for concept rendering. I have Thinking PBR material in Rhino will give me cool renderings. I have seen and spend a lot of time to create Rhino material for my archviz projects with not very cool renderings.
I have seen that material for archviz with many merial in scenes is the best way not use more as 2k maps. Im thinking about to create 1k or 0,5 k maps for Rhino materials. For concepts it is enough. After sync in Twinmotion the materials can be overwritten with Twinmotion original material.