Rhino Materials

Rendering
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Rhino Materials

Rhino materials are in need of serious improvement. Here are my main points:

  • Lack of a Native Node-Based Material Editor:
    Rhino currently lacks a native node-based material editor. Since Rhino already includes Grasshopper, implementing such a system for materials should be feasible. Even if this functionality were integrated within Grasshopper, it would be a welcome addition. This integration would focus on enabling complex and procedural material creation—without necessarily requiring deep coding with languages like C# or Python.

  • Advanced Material Generation:
    A native node-based editor could enable advanced material generation by leveraging engine-based procedural maps, Rhino maps, or transforming maps. This would simplify material creation and transform the complex, maze-like wrapping and nesting in the current UI into a more navigable workflow.

  • Substance Designer and Other Material Creation Apps Like It:
    While Substance Designer demonstrates a powerful node-based workflow for procedural textures and dynamic material variations, merely exporting maps as PBR textures in Rhino results in lost functionality. This approach diminishes the ability to achieve infinitely tileable materials that effectively hide repetitions, by varying each tile. and many more like increasing the feedback loop and reducing user’s ability to mix rhino and other render engines maps.

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As Rhino’s render engine is pulled from Blender perhaps a Blender bridge export from Rhino would be the easier solution. I agree Cycles is best with the native node editor within Blender. I just don’t know what the more difficult programming task is, bridging to Blender or using Grasshopper to mimic the node editor for Cycles.

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Hi -
You could try the new components in the Rhino 9 WIP…

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image609×849 76.2 KB

-wim

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This is not really the same as what OP asks for. There is no way to change the material shader graphs, only how textures are created to be fed into boilerplate material shader graphs.

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