I’m using Rhino 8 for Mac on Apple Silicon, macOS Tahoe 26.3.1, mainly for interior design.
I need a fast way to take viewport screenshots showing materials, shadows and artificial lighting, with better texture mapping — not final photorealistic renders.
Rhino Rendered mode doesn’t give me the lighting I need, while Raytraced is far too slow for daily design iterations.
Could you recommend a Rhino-integrated plugin or workflow that works directly with the .3dm model, with no export/import to external software?
Ideally, it should support Rhino lights, especially linear/LED lighting, and update quickly while I modify the model, materials and colours.
Is it raytraced that is too slow, or your hardware?
In terms of software, your limit is just the GPU speed really. So you will need a faster, discrete GPU.
I’m not sure even Twinmotion will give you what you need, because of the constraint through your Apple hardware.
Unfortunately, the only thing I can think of is using something like Chaos Vantage, which is extremely fast; but needs a “proper” GPU. But it basically scales linearly with GPU count.
Thanks David. My hardware is a 2021 16" MacBook Pro, Apple M1 Pro, 16 GB unified memory.
But perhaps I should clarify my goal: I don’t actually need ray tracing or final photorealistic rendering. During the design phase I need something much simpler and faster — basically a Rhino viewport where I can see materials/textures + shadows + artificial lights (especially LED/linear lights) at the same time, and take screenshots while I develop the project.
Rhino Rendered mode would actually be sufficient for the level of image quality I need, but I haven’t found a way to combine the useful Ambient Occlusion look with the scene lights. Raytraced gives me the lighting, but is far too slow for this kind of continuous design work.
So I’m wondering whether there is a lightweight Rhino/Mac solution for this specific workflow, rather than a faster photorealistic ray-tracing renderer.