I have been quite silent for quite a long time. I’ve worked on many bits and pieces for the RhinoCycles integration.
Just yesterday I managed to dramatically improve the Raytraced viewport responsiveness. It is now a real treat to use Raytraced and manipulate the view in it. @andy did his own part through improving the drawing speed of the viewport - the bit where Cycles computed pixels get put on your screen, so thanks there too!
RhinoCycles now has also a shadows-only ground plane.
Wallpaper is fixed. Proper toggling and stretching.
There’s also a bonus tool I’m working on, just watch the video I made about these improvements. You’ll see
Hi Nathan - very nice, thanks - One thing though - here, I do not see Cycles in the Render panel or as ‘current renderer’ in the Render menu - I do get the raytraced viewport, but not the controls in the panel, as in your clip at about 1:39. I’m feeling left out.
Another thing I noticed is that with the ground plane set to show shadows only, and only Skylight is used to light the scene, the GP is not white - it is gray. One thing that is pretty common to want to do is to render an object with soft shadows on an all white field - this seems like it is almost there but not quite.
Hi Pascal, from this post, it looks like there will be a separate plugin for Cycles as a renderer apart from a display mode. (Of course that doesn’t bother or limit Nathan at this point )
“Cycles for Rhino” as visible in my video is indeed a separate plug-in. A plug-in that isn’t bundled with Rhino, but for the time being will be distributed to users who know to ask for it and how to use it.
@pascal, the grayness on the ground plane with skylight is known. I mention that in my video. For now extra light is needed, but I probably will look into having it behave nicer without the need for such light, too.
Looks like a nice speed improvement, but there is one thing I wonder, is it possible to work with a different “background” than black? 50% gray, or brown makes much more sense to me than black as all renderings have some light in them. The only thing I don’t like about iterating renderings is that they become lighter due to the black backround. And it would be even better if you could repeat or even blend all the rendered pixles in the first pass.
Just a though.
Sure it is possible to use different backgrounds. For many test scenes I am generally too lazy to set that up, I like to use the gradient background quite a lot, but probably should unlazy myself instead
I am not sure we are talking about the same thing, I am not referring to the Rhino environment, but the blackness that is present at the first render pass.
That I can’t necessarily do much about. It depends a bit on how samples are taken, and sampling is done in a pretty much random way (albeit controlled at that). What I probably can do is tweak settings for the start of the render, but for now that isn’t the highest priority. Consider it noted though. It is actually something @andy made me think about too, so it is kinda on my radar anyway
)
