I realize Ambient Occlusion is not based in reality, but after playing with it in Blender (skylight turned off, AO on, one “sun”), I think it would be a great addition for quick & dirty renders here in Rhino.
I don’t know if AO is planned anywhere in Rhino yet, but would love to see it as a basic option! I know it was in the MAC build for the default rhino Renderer for a while, and I thought I stumbled across it somewhere else. Regardless, Cycles has AO built into the engine, and it would be swell if we could some day take advantage of that through the RhinoCycles plugin.
Right now I work on getting as much of existing Rhino Render functionality implemented with as few buttons, bells and whistles as possible.
We’re very close to having that done now, where rendering will be as simple as possible for the majority of users.
Once we’re confident that this is the case we can start adding access to the rest of the Cycles tools, including custom shader creation with some kind of node editor (Grasshopper comes to mind) and all sorts of control over environment techniques including Ambient Occlusion. I can’t say when, but I definitely want to provide access to as many features as possible.
That’s good news! I can see the logic of getting the “replacement of default” up and running first.
Hopefully McNeel continues to see the value of on-going development beyond just the replacement, so we can see the node based editor as well!
I remember the sneek previews of features we were going to see in the enhanced OpenGL viewport (moving water, groundplane reflections, even talked of live AO), and hope Cycles integration continues.
I understand why development on OpenGL enhancements was stopped as raytracing became fast enough (Neon and now Cycles), and raytracing looks better anyway, so I’m not complaining about that. Just hoping that Cycles continues to get attention after the ‘feature parity’ has been passed.
