Brilliant news on the release candidate. Is there any news on the release of a Plugin SDK, so we can get some externals render plugins going?
Nothing yet.
Is it likely to happen in the next couple of months or years? ie. is it worth considering purchasing Rhino OSX (if you need render plugins)?
I can’t answer that.
We aren’t diverting any development resources to it until we get Mac Rhino shipped.
Then I expect there will be a few major problems that need to be fixed once a larger number of people start using it.
Once that dust settles, then the developers go back to working on the missing features (like Layouts, etc), and working on the SDK. We will use our own plug-ins (Flamingo, Brazil, etc) to proof the public SDK before it is released to third-party developers that can then begin work on Mac Rhino plug-ins if they determine it is worth their time and effort.
Any time guess by me, in light of all those unknowns would be irresponsible.
If you need render plug-in now, then Mac Rhino is not for you.
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Gosh. I have waited over 8 years so far. I guess I will have to wait a couple more years. I kind of thought that such a long development time would lead to an application which was pretty comparable in features to the Windows version when finally released. It would need plugin potential to be that. At the very least I would suggest that you need to have a timescale fixed for doing this. Ah well, I guess I will have to stick with Windows for a bit longer.
Rhino for Windows has been in development since the mid-1990s.
Many of the features added to Windows Rhino made Rhino attractive and useful to an ever widening circle of potential users. Rendering is one of those enhancements.
Instead of continuing to develop Mac Rhino for several more years, we decided it was better to get an initial release out there that was focused on the core needs of Industrial Designers. After all, that’s who Rhino was and is primarily intended for.
The advantage of Mac Rhino having an “older brother” in Windows Rhino, we have a proven list of enhancements to work on that we know will be useful to lots of users.
Forgive me, I am only and Architect, not an Industrial Designer. I guess my views are less valid. I would be surprised if Industrial Designers don’t require some rendering output in order to present their design ideas. I would see this as quite a core need.
I am well aware of Rhino’s development history. I was on board right from the very early betas and I have purchased every release since. In some cases pushing my employer to make it standard amongst their employees. I have extensively used Rhino to model everything from small items of furniture to large department stores. It is excellent application. As I said, I look forward to being able to use the OSX version once it supports render plugins.
Not at all less valid, just not in the core of who Rhino was originally intended for.
Better Rendering and page Layouts are certainly in the core needs of Architects.
These tools will be coming along in “dot” updates of Mac Rhino and we intended to complete many of them before Windows V6 is released.
We really do “get it”
Cheers.
I’m really happy to hear this. A little update on this front…
There are other options in the interim. Maybe not a direct plug and play solution, but if you’re reasonably consistent in how you name things in the project it’s entirely possible to export to another format and import into something mac based that CAN render, and there’s a slug of them out there.
I use blender’s cycles. It’s reasonably fast if you use GPUs (way faster than LuxRender and some of the other’s I’ve played with but not as fast as octane), quite easy to set up materials with (either via a linked preset library or via appends from a library, I use both depending on what I’m done), has a built in compositor which is also utterly scriptable. It’s very much node based so if you’re comfortable in any other node based render engine you can get up to speed tweaking things easily. It supports multi-pass rendering quite well which can save boatloads of render time on animations. With some clever naming conventions in Rhino and a tad bit of scripting in blender you can relatively easily automate stuff like having an import move the groups to specific layers for multi-pass rendering, assign materials, group named objects to empty parents for animating purposes etc.
I’m quite happy with the results I’ve been getting, and now that I have it down it’s only a couple minutes worth of setup once I export a model to get it up in Blender and kick off a render.
Worth a look for those that are render dependent sans plugins.
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Thank dan & LewnWorx,
Clearly render plugins require the third party developer to do much of the work, but they are telling me that they can’t start until they have more to go on than there is now. I am glad that this seems to be a priority now.
I appreciate I can apply materials and render outside Rhino. This works OK on models with limited materials, but it doesn’t work for me with my current work flow. I have models with 30 or 40 different materials (sometimes many more). There is no way I can quickly assign these every time you need to do a test render.
Its not the end of the world, I will just have to carry on using Rhino for Windows until Rhino OSX is up to full speed.
Fair points all. It works in my case as I really don’t need to do a render during the modeling phase, and the materials tend to usually be pretty much the same thing, assigned in the same way so that buys some wiggle room on the export to obj / import to blender thing.
I could see in say in architectural sort of setting with lots of “prop” type items that would bring all kinds of differing materials in play that it would be a much greater challenge and obviously need something fairly tightly coupled to the rendering engine to be of use.
I am aware that work is underway for an interactive plugin to use Blender’s renderer within the Rhino environment, and while it’s dependent upon the SDK to work it’s possible that as this is an entirely new plugin it may be using the “new” SDK / Framework which could make it more “mac” friendly to port thus perhaps speeding up the port time. Dunno, I’m not involved with it at all and haven’t been paying super close attention to it.
I’ve not really got into the whole plugin based rendering notion, mainly due to those types of issues. Renderer specific materials and whatnot bring all kinds of workflow issues to the table.
Tried Keyshot Mac? Version 6 will add interior lighting.
https://www.keyshot.com/2015/keyshot-6-feature-preview-1/
Imports native Rhino files. Updates to Rhino files can be re-imported without disturbing previous work. Almost (kinda) like a plugin in terms of how Keyshot normally works since KS does not render inside Rhino. The Windows KS plugin basically just launches KS and imports the file. One click to do that vs. two to launch KS and import.
Just a thought for ya if you want to go all Mac and such works for you…