Having spent some considerable time building a new PC, running bench tests, and in panic about GPUs, I thought I’d have my drink of choice having finished; Vimto (originally from Manchester in the UK) is a cordial, which has a rich and deep ruby colour.
The modelling is entirely in Rhino. The image is rendered using Bella (the Rhino plugin).
Nice design and rendering, but I think to a bright background.
Thanks. I would agree that it was a shade dark. I think this is mostly due to the energy loss in the lens. I think if I redid this, I certainly would increase the exposure a little, just to bring out the colour a bit more.
Excellent work. 
How satisfied are you with the Bella renderer?
Thank you very much.
Quite simply, for me it is outstanding. The support has been second to none, my stupid questions are always answered, and the updates are excellent. The implementation and integration into Rhino is very nice and easy enough to use.
While it may be argued that the integration isn’t quite as extensive(?) as Vray, for a new generation renderer, I can’t fault it. I don’t have to subscribe my life away to use it, which as a hobbyist, is a massive advantage of Bella.
The support for Rhino WIP has also been added with the most recent update. I don’t think as far as I can see that anyone else has bothered with WIP as extensively, or even at all(?). Even the Rhino Cycles 3.5 engine hasn’t got into WIP before Bella did. I think that is really nice to see.
Entirely personal to me:
I am quite Scifi based really, so sometimes, resources like Chaos Cosmos being not in there can make it a little more difficult, if I want to place furniture or a person, just because you have to go off and find an open-source resource, which is fine generally; but then sometimes you fight with whatever materials come with it.
Sometimes I am eager to see what my Intel Arc can do as a ‘fun new/experimental toy’, so sometimes it is sad to see my GPU sat doing nothing.*
For those used to the (many rubbish) pre-loaded materials that come with many renderers; they are not there in Bella. However, the Bella Quick material has largely resolved speed of material creation.
The few parameters that are scale invariant (noise-like procedurals) can sometimes need a bit of thought to get working how I like, compared to say something easy like GIMP.
*I waffle on about this GPU, but this point is an irrelvance for the very few people on Earth with one. But they are working on GPU support as we speak. Perhaps we will see some CUDA implementation
Overall, I would immediately recommend Bella all day long for anyone asking, especially if you do not want to be enslaved to subscribe.
I agree, the support from the Bella renderer developer is exemplary. Jeremy is very active and always tries to help with any problem.
I personally also use V-ray, which has perhaps the best possible plugin for Rhino. Its implementation in Rhino is absolutely excellent. It can be seen that v-ray has been in the market for decades and that hundreds of developers are developing it. Material library, stable plugin, high quality and speed. I can see why V-ray is probably the most used renderer for Rhino.
Yes, Bella is a young render engine. The implementation in Rhino is basic but functional. I’m glad the latest build works with the WIP. I had some problems with Rhino 7, now everything works almost 100%.
The only thing that bothers me about Bell at the moment is that it doesn’t support region rendering directly in Rhino (or I haven’t found it), no material library, no render passes directly in Rhino.
On the other hand, even though it’s an unbiased rendering engine, I like the speed of Saturn mode. Although it seems to me that V-ray has sharper renders (I don’t know what it is). I’m looking forward to the developers finishing the hybrid mode and I can use my RTX 3070 Ti. I hope the GPU implementation doesn’t end up like the Maxwell renderer. If it was possible to render at Saturn mode quality (plus caustic) in hybrid mode, it would be amazing.
At the moment I’m just trying Bella and I like her philosophy. Its rapid development looks optimistic. I wonder where this engine will be in 2 years.
