Testing out the new display features

Giving the V6 a testrun. I really like the Thickness and Edge Softening combination. It’s great for quick concept work in single sheet thickness with solidpoints on.
Combined with curvepiping of course.

Technical is fast too:

And it looks quite similar to RhinoRender too:

But Cycles aren’t quite there yet. Far from as responsive as Neon, lighting isn’t right and self-reflections seems to be missing too:

Indeed there seems to be something wrong with reflective <-> reflective reflections in Cycles. I created an issue for it here: http://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-32877

/Nathan

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Thanks Nathan,

Just updated the file a bit.
(This will probably evolve into the reference file for Holomark3.)

Rendered Display mode:

Rhino Render:

Cycles display mode:

The option to set it as render engine is gone, or is it baked into Rhino Render?

See this one, Jørgen:

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@Holo, I’ve just created a dedicated metal material for RhinoCycles. Self-reflection and metal-metal reflection should work in an upcoming build, created after this moment of writing :slightly_smiling:

Sounds great, but do I need to add a special material in the scene, or is it intelligent enough to recognize reflections in all materials? It would be cumbersome if we have to add special materials to get a display mode to work.

You don’t have to add special materials. You should use just the basic materials as provided by Rhino itself: metal, glass, plastic, plaster, paint, gems. What I did was add a special Cycles material that simulates metal with the simplest possible node tree.

If with the next WIP build you find not all reflective materials reflect properly you should report that to me, as this is something that all should be converted behind the scenes.

If you want to you can of course directly use the Cycles specific materials, but you shouldn’t have to :slightly_smiling:

/Nathan

Great, thanks! Have you figured out why specular isn’t working right?
Also lighting is a bit off, as Rhino render and the Raytraced display needs to be the same, imo.

And regarding the materials we really need a reflection blur setting, and other settings for the material types, it’s nice to have them simple, but they are too limited, so for now I have to use the custom materials to get to these features.

BTW, if you’d like to test out the car model I can send it in a PM.

Since Cycles is a physically based render engine the old RhinoRender concept of separate specular highlight color doesn’t fit. Many Blender users originally bumped into this as well. Currently there isn’t a BSDF yet that allows for tinted specular, but I have it on my to-do list. Mind you that this will be to cater for some artistic freedom, but essentially veers away from physically based rendering.

So for now this won’t work, I’ll notify everybody when I’ve done a BSDF with tinted specular highligt.

We will be doing another pass of light tweaking at some point. There will still be some differences though. In my opinion for instance skylight enabled with Rhino Studio EXR in a default scene with a white cube on a white plane Cycles renders correctly and RhinoRender doesn’t (the white block will be more gray)

For the basic materials that support it, like metal and glass this is governed by the Polish setting. That said, the basic materials are exactly that - basic.

My idea is that at some point there’ll be a way to get to the core of Cycles shaders, namely by allowing users to build their shaders from nodes, just like in Blender, but likely utilizing the GrassHopper GUI to do that.

Only then the advanced user who wants it can really dive into it and create exactly the shaders wanted with the possibilities given by the Cycles nodes. If you want to get a head start on learning those I suggest creating a simple scene and start learning the Cycles nodes through Blender :slightly_smiling:

Another target is to drastically improve materials by creating a good library with better control - for those users who want more than the basic materials, but don’t want to dive into the core of Cycles shading. That is something for the future though. First the existing materials and good conversion for them, adding necessary features to Cycles shading as the needs arises (tinted specular, shadow catcher, etc).

I certainly do! I like to collect good real-world files to test RhinoCycles with. I already have several good files, but I’d be happy to receive more to broaden the test suite.

/Nathan

Regarding the materials, if you want to see what the current shader graphs are for the Rhino basic materials that have dedicated materials you can check https://github.com/mcneel/RhinoCycles/tree/master/Materials

The classes you are interested in are DiffuseMaterial (plaster), GlassMaterial (glass, gem), SimpleMetalMaterial (metal) and SimplePlasticMaterial (plastic). For the current implementation of the Rhino custom material you can check https://github.com/mcneel/RhinoCycles/blob/master/Shaders/RhinoFullNxt.cs

/Nathan