Concept is a new native display mode tailored for architects and designers who want to present their 3D models with a clean, early-design stage aesthetic in Rhino.
It renders with a gradient background: light blue to light brown (top to bottom), soft shadows, and an emphasized silhouette, giving models a sketch or concept drawing look, while keeping a sense of spatial depth. We enabled the new feathered-edge grid to keep the focus on the design, while giving a sense of scale and support.
Concept Display is aimed at:
Maintaining a clean visual feedback that reflects the design intention as you model
Quickly communicating early-stage designs with a presentation-ready look straight from your 3D model
Applying Concept mode to your Details and Layouts to create consistent architectural drawings
Why this Feature?
Architects & designers often need to present models in early-design stages, in a way that feels intentional and sketch-like, as opposed to overly rendered or technical. Until now, achieving this look required either exporting to a separate application or manually tweaking display settings from scratch.
Concept mode gives architects & designers a fast, one-click starting point for presentation-quality visuals that still look like design, not production.
In Architecture:
In Industrial Design:
The mode is particularly useful for:
Massing and volume studies
Client presentations during schematic design
Competition entries and academic work
Additional Information
Materials are fully rendered, including reflections & refraction.
Customize its settings in Options > View > Display Modes > Concept.
Concept is a Technical Display mode. As such, it is not supported by SetObjectDisplayMode command.
@Rhino_Bulgaria - FYI the developers are looking into the crashes and long freezes btw (RH-96729 Concept display mode: long uncancellable freeze (Esc ignored) and occasional crash when applying it to older files).
As of now, I can’t set only selected objects to use Display Mode = Concept and when I’m in the Concept Display Mode I can set some objects to use e.g. Shaded, but it doesn’t work. I’m writing about this because I would like to have only objects in the foreground using Hidden Lines. There are potentially a couple of ways to achieve that:
Per object Hidden Line setting so mixing Display Mode settings with some Model Object settings (impossible in Rhino at the moment)
Having two flavors of Concept display mode - 1. Hidden Lines = On and 2. Hidden Lines = Off. Set Viewport to Concept (Hidden Lines = Off) and for the selected objects change Display Mode from By View to Concepts (Hidden Lines = On).
In complicated scenes there can be many overlapping geometries in the background, using Hidden Lines for all geometries in the scene can result in very messy, convoluted picture.
The default Concept display mode is used. The box from Grasshopper on the right is shown with less saturated color or in other words it looks sort of pale.
Anyway, I don’t know if the others have noticed it too, but there is this selection bug. As you can see, when I select a surface, sometimes the others are selected as well, turning all the surfaces yellow.
There is also this strange behavior: if I enable the control points and select the surface, the background also gets a yellowish tint.
Hi @Czaja - I see what you’re aiming for here and I agree that it would be very useful.
Concept Display mode is a Technical Mode. Hidden Lines are an attribute of Technical Modes. As you may know, these modes are special-cased. Due to certain architectural limitations, it is not possible to use SetObjectDisplayMode to assign a Technical Mode to the object. Only standard modes are supported.
@Vanessa how do I need to modify the concept display mode so the shadows are less crisp. I want the shadows more soft / blurry but can’t get it to work.
@Vanessa This is a nice mode! However, I like to set locked objects to be transparent, and it does not really work in this mode. Instead, locked objects can have some transparency but are very dark regardless of how transparent I set them to be. Maybe it’s not a transparency issue - maybe it’s an issue with how dark locked objects are?
I’m glad that you seeing it too. Since it is not possible to use SetObjectDisplayMode for this purpose there would be needed a parallel mechanism or exception for the technical views, so it would be possible to set Concept 1 and Concept 2 for different Objects - but that doesn’t seem as an elegant solution. Frankly, I don’t know what could be done to this problem without adding complexity. Only thing that comes to my mind is pushing more and more Display Mode settings to the Objects. In that scenario Viewport Display Mode would be treated more like a general starting point with configuration emphasis moved to the Objects.
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