Hi folks,
I’ve just installed Rhino for the first time in 8 years, after a long hiatus using many other things. This is feedback based on my experience thus far. I hope it’s helpful:
- Rhino 8’s visualization is FAST! …until you start applying certain types of Materials.
With modern GPU acceleration, I’m able to do things that just weren’t practical when I last used Rhino (or anywhere else, really, unless you had access to really high-end hardware). For the most part, I’m happily impressed by the speed at which it renders NURBS.
However… this all starts slowing rapidly when PBR Materials with any complex math (noise, fractals, etc.) start getting applied.
So long as I stick with simpler Materials or only use Arctic, things are fine. When Materials with things like Simplex Noise are applied, performance nosedives in Rendered view.
Arctic is great, though, for knowing what the current forms are, etc. Such an improvement over the old Solid render!
It feels like there should be some in-between, where there’s a mode that’s like Arctic (call it “Colored Arctic”, maybe?), but it stores an average of the RGB the values of the procedural Materials behind the scenes, so that we at least have a good sense of the color values, etc. as we’re iterating. Right now it feels like Materials should only be applied at the very end.
I’ve done further testing, and if the PBR Materials are kept to one color, performance is quite acceptable even with a fairly complex model, even when adding in some translucent materials, etc. So this is clearly an issue w/ the performance of the noise, etc.
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Thus far, I have hard far fewer of “can’t do this” errors, in terms of Booleans. Not zero; there are a few situations I’ve hit where Rhino still can’t quite figure out what to do. But it’s night and day over how things were. This is a major improvement in feel; I don’t feel nearly as constrained by the boolean solver. Same with Lofts, where I have yet to break it!
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I absolutely adore PushPull for quick modification of surface details!
However, being a greedy end-user who just wants more… I wish it would auto-project onto the Surfaces, rather than requiring an intermediate step, with an option to project entirely through (i.e., both sides get the projection) or to project onto only the nearest hit. Having to do the projection onto the Surfaces and delete the Curves I don’t want seems like an unnecessary step.
I’d also really like a way to do PushPull, but create new capped solids when pulling “out” from the Surfaces, rather than cut the Surfaces of the existing solids. This would reduce model complexity somewhat and be easier to manage for larger work, where a PushPull step, once taken, may be a permanent change, difficult to undo later.
To put it another way: if I’m working on a design for something, and I love the basic geometry, I don’t want to have to commit forever to surface detailing merely because I did a PushPull. I want that base shape intact, uncut. I realize that I can probably do this, by storing the base form and using it for a final boolean on the modified form later… but again, this feels like an unnecessary interruption to workflow (and also means I have to plan far in advance, rather than just keep creating).
I’d also like a PushPull that can handle “domed” geometry, by creating a Loft ending in a Point. Think: small pebbly grip details on a shoe; small ornamental work on jewelry, or greebles on conceptual pieces, sci-fi art for 3D printing, etc.
- The UI has changed a lot. Some of it’s good, some of it has me typing a lot to find the commands, rather than using my mouse.
In general, I find myself both wanting to figure out how to how tie all my commonly-used commands to the middle-click context menu… and not wanting to, because that means that I’d have to figure out how to add commands to said menu.
When using Rhino, I tend to stick with an old-fashioned modeling workflow- Extrude, Revolve, Loft, the occasional Curve Array- followed by Booleans. Sometimes with all of the intermediate steps w/ Curves and Polylines to get the form right.
This has always felt like a good process for quick iteration, and no longer feeling constrained by hardware is great.
But the process spans multiple commands spread around the UI and for a few things, I can’t for the life of me find the icon… and now I’m typing into the command-line a lot. I’m sure at some point soon I’ll burn the hour or so it’ll take to tie everything to that hotbar, but I’ve had some horrible experiences with that kind of UI in the past (for example, in one application, losing all of it because it was tied to a project that was deleted, for no particular reason, and several where I’ve lost all that work invested when the software updated) that make me a bit worried about committing to it.
5… I dearly miss toon-style rendering like the old Penguin used to do.
This is something I’m sure a lot of people are missing (but not enough, apparently, to save Penguin, which makes me sad). The current rendering setting to draw polylines doesn’t allow exclusion of isocurves, for example, so there’s no way to achieve roughly the same look quickly, even if you mess w/ the PBR system to get something vaguely like the old Penguin blurred Blinn-Phong look.
Simply being able to exclude isocurves would a big change, but also being able to adjust how the edge curves are blended into the final result, via setting a color and a blend type (multiply, additive, etc.) would be very helpful for line-drawing styles.
- The post-FX system in Rendering feels like it’s not quite polished; clearly, post-FX are supposed to have user-accessible settings, but the main ones like the denoiser don’t.
I presume there are ways to alter the denoising / AA / etc. in the main rendering settings, but it’s a bit clunky having to go different places in the UI to get things done and iterate.
Bloom feels very all-or-nothing, with no in-Material control over how it’ll respond, other than the Intensity of the light transmission.
The separate renders for things like Glow are neat.
The Normals Channel either doesn’t do what I’m expecting (a view of the normals of the geometry as rendered, for use as a normalmap elsewhere) or it’s borked; all I see is a gray render.
The Depth Channel view doesn’t have any parameters to adjust it to produce something suitable for transformation into a normalmap, either (or objects must be scale to enormous scales to see it).
- Bringing in new images to use for Environments feels harder than it needs to be, and the application doesn’t ship with a truly neutral one that doesn’t have any directionality or angle to the light, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether Environments could be tilted, rotated, etc. to adjust quickly, taking a neutral overhead and turning it into a neutral 45-degree spot, etc. Studio B and C are close, but not actually perfect, and my current use case really needs a simple, old-fashioned overhead light that is truly neutral and some edge lighting to keep sides of things from being crushed to absolute blacks.
The Sun light remains somewhat over-complex for this kind of use case, too, and I’m a bit loathe to have to set up a multi-light array of Point lights to get a decent result, but I’ll do what I have to.
The only supported path for Environments requires a HDR image and only has an Intensity value that can be adjusted easily, which I’m not normally working with and struggled to understand how to produce. After a bit of struggle-bus, I managed to get a HDR image built in Photoshop that I thought might work, but it still didn’t give me what I was really looking for; tight bright highlights and a simple overhead light without directional bias.
I want something like the Curves operation in Photoshop, where I can boost / crush white and blacks with a custom curve if I want more brightness or deeper shadows.
In general, I’m having difficulty with shiny materials in the PBR workflow; for mattes and low-reflectivity sheens it’s great, but high-gloss, it’s less easy to get the visual result I want.
I presume I’ll eventually figure all of this out, of course, but after a few days of use, this is one of the little areas of friction.
- I’d really like edge-detection Materials, to allow mixing of two results according to how close we are to the Surface’s edge.
For a lot of things where we’re trying to do a little basic weathering, chipping or albedo changes to enhance realism a little, this is one of the primary considerations, and it seems like this might be (relatively) easy to do. Ideally, one would mix two Materials based on edge proximity using , so that, for example, you could do Paint mixed with a Metal in one Material.
This would take the image quality from, “hey, that’s raytraced” to “hey, I almost don’t feel the need to drag it into another application, unwrap it, and paint it” for a lot of things where you want a little sense of real-world behaviors in materials, but you do not want to invest huge amounts of time into building a skinned model or you simply have time constraints that make this impractical.
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I presume that there’s no way to export the final results of the Materials directly out to a mapped, textured, PBR-ready workflow, for final adjustment? The current documentation has an example of UV adjustments (and that looks fabulous) but I haven’t seen a way to export a Material out as a texture.
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The Mesh tools, which were barely in their infancy when I last used Rhino, are pretty amazing. I loved being able to do NURBs booleans on a mesh to fix up a STL for somebody in 10 minutes.
Anyhow, all of the above is minor stuff and I understand that some of it’s specific to what I’m doing, etc. No major crashes or showstoppers have been encountered.
IDK how many 3D software environments I’ve used over the years, but… a lot… and they all have their foibles and learning-curve problems. I just thought you folks might find this feedback useful.
In general, Rhino’s biggest strength (to me, at any rate) remains the tools I missed elsewhere: fast development of forms for mechanical design, tight CAD-style control over shapes, scales, mirroring etc., and powerful booleans, coupled with classic four-view workflows.
Rhino’s far and away superior to a lot of stuff I’ve used in these areas and the speed of visualization is really impressive; I can mainly just concentrate on making stuff, which (after 8 years of not using it) only took me a couple of days to get back into flow.
