I’m curious if the workflow between Rhino and Blender has improved at all. Last time I used them together cleaning up the meshes in Blender was a huge hassle. Of course that was several years ago and I’m sure there was some user error involved.
Splitting this off from original thread to keep that one more on topic (:
I am not aware of any specific effort to improve the workflow. In Rhino WIP there have been some fixes to OBJ and FBX export that may help with this.
If you have suggestions to improve the workflow then please do tell and elaborate. For reasons I am interested (:
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Thanks @nathanletwory the other thread has been meandering a bit. Not having done and Rhino->Blender work in awhile I don’t have much insight on how it currently works. Honestly all the meshing improvements may have already solved the problems I had.
I don’t use Blender now but 3 things make it really tempting for the future. Ongoing Cycles development, Eevee, and better performance with lots of meshes. Mesh performance for render scenes with lots of props that Rhino has a hard time with, Eevee because it may be able to replace Cycles for most of my needs, and Cycles for whatever Eevee can’t do.
With Cycles in Rhino and the ongoing SubD development, shared Cycles materials and a nice exporter would likely meet what I’m imaging my workflow would be. Now if it’s possible to bring Eevee into Rhino I could probably do 95% of what I need without having to switch programs.
The best workflow is through MoI. MoI generates much cleaner meshes than Rhino.
I regularly rebase my patches on top of Cycles master, so you get quite good updates there.
I have followed Eevee somewhat, but I haven’t looked at the code, nor have I investigated the possibility of integrating it. I suppose it mostly comes down to two issues: does it have a good API as a library, and is the license of the code good to make it into a library. If the answers are yes to both then it could eventually end up as another realtime render engine integration.
Regarding mesh improvements I suppose you’ll have to try and test it (:
Edit: forgot almost about the materials, but there have been efforts to dump the shader graphs at their lowest levels directly from Cycles, and have Cycles also read those back in. That could be interesting, but I haven’t investigated that further.
So you are suggesting something like Rhino->MoI->Blender?
Yes - that’s my workflow for any geometry that I might need to work with on the other end. Model in Rhino, open in MoI, export as OBJ. I export to C4D but the issue is the same.
Even on a very simple object you can see the difference. Rhino exported as OBJ on the left and MoI exported as OBJ on the right.
I guess @DavidEranen and his QuadMesher may help there - when he can get back to it.
Wow. I need good meshes too, but I didn’t know MOI could do thi o much better (I own a license).
How do I export a mesh from MOI? I actually thought of it once, but being on the run I couldn’t find out how to so I just dropped it.
// Rolf
rhinos meshes are not good no doubt, still if you set it properly and do some decent modeling
you can easily get away with some usable meshes, specifically on simple single surfaces.
uncheck everything never mind pack texture, set density to 1 and everything except both edge length values to 0 rising the edge values will lead to bigger quads which logically will break into triangles if maxed over and vice versa smaller values lead to smaller quads. just keep them equal.
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No mystery here. Open the file in MoI, select all the geometry, select Export (from File in the bottom left hand corner) and choose Wavefront OBJ
OK, I should have figured that one out myself… 
// Rolf