My name is Lefteris. I’ve been using Rhino 6 at work for quite a long time however, only recently I started experimenting with rendering. I now work on an evaluation licence for Rhino 8.
I have some questions regarding textures and rendering settings. This is because, it seems to me, Rhino 8 behaves a bit differently than 6 so I’m a bit confused.
In the picture below you can see my render from Rhino 6. Notice the purple colour and the texture on the black fretboard. These are the colours and textures I’m after.
Now, when I moved to Rhino 8, the render might look a lot more realistic but the textures, the colour and the lights are very different (screenshot below). Now, while the logo and the tuners appear to reflect light in a nice way, the colour of the headstock is washed and the texture on the fretboard looks quite strange too. While playing around with values in the materials setup for the headstock and fretboard and the values for sun, skylight, reflections in the render panel, I managed to make things worse (second screenshot below).
So, the question becomes, can someone please help me achieve (in Rhino 8) the same colours and textures as I had in Rhino 6 but with the realism that Rhino 8 seems to have?
I would very much appreciate your help!
The difference may be use of this option in the color adjustment section of the Rendering panel in Rhino 8. If you don’t have the Rendering panel open, use the Rendering command to open it. Try unchecking Use linear workflow there.
Thank you for looking into this. I deactivated the linear workflow and when leaving Gamma at 1, there’s no difference. But when I decrease Gamma to 0.5, that makes a huge difference.
I’m still quite uncertain though as the same RGB colour seems to come across differently between what I had before (e.g. in Rhino 6) and what I have now (in v8). Since this will be for product development, if possible, I’d like to stay true to the colours as much as possible.
I’m happy to send you the file I’m working on because I think there might be more than one thing at play and I’d love to understand how this part of the software works and be able to utilise it’s full potential. If that’s something you could help with (and are willing of course) please let me know what I can do on my end to help.
It could be the lighting in the file from v6 to v8 or some other change. I’d need to see a small sample file and screenshots from v6 and then v8 using that smaller file. Select only one surface for instance and use the Export command to save only it as a 3dm. Then open that new file in v6 and v8 respectively to make sure the problem is still seen. If it is, post that file. If you can’t post the file, email tech@mcneel.com and I’ll take a look.
Thank you Brian. I emailed a small 3dm file to the email you said. Fingers crossed your and the team’s help we can sort this out and I can finally understand how this works
you have a grey texture map overlaid on top of your purple base color… you have to lower the map influence, or edit the color of your map to be purple and not grey -
Thank you for this feedback, much appreciated. Indeed, I tried to decrease that all the way to 0 and at 0 the colour is exactly what I would expect (screenshot below).
So, it seems that the main cause of my pains is the texture and less so the lights/reflections in the rendering panel? I applied the texture from an image I downloaded (also shown below) which is exactly what I want to achieve in terms of texture but in purple colour. As you see the original image is the colour of the wood so I enabled the “greyscale” to be able to let the base colour through. Seems like that wasn’t the right thing. You suggested to make the texture purple. Can I do that in Rhino or should I try to do that in a different software?
ps
I also got your other message about the default settings for the rendering, and I tried that too but that’s changing too many things at once so I wouldn’t know where the problem actually is. So perhaps I’ll revert those settings afterwards.
In addition to Kyle’s notes, also take in mind that Cycles is seemingly very sensitive to the envrionment as well. Even using the same HDRI, one can go from looking half decent in a short time, to looking awful, just by changing the HDRI projection angle.
I would also tend to recommened getting rid of the gamma correction in rendering altogether, and then doing a tone mapping in post if required. But that is more for the render, less so the material. This example below is Cycles, with a custom arbitrary material applied, gamma off, and a play with the camera as well. The material is coinstructed as a PBR.
Thank you for the input on this. I’ve been at this for a couple of days now (and more before that in Rhino 6 but let’s forget about 6 now) and I noticed some of what you mentioned. Also when zooming in or out seems to produce different things. I have to admit, I didn’t dig deeper into that. I’ll disable the Gamma in the “Dithering and Color Adjustment” and see what happens!
Thanks!
I would consider approaching this via something like GIMP.
In GIMP (3.0.4), for example, we can paste your original into a new file. The first thing I would do is try and recover the “darkness“. Top menu… Colors → Invert, which gets you…
