Using Toucan materials with Rhino renderer?

When I go to Applications > Rhinoceros > Right click / Show Package Contents > Contents > PlugIns.

Now I found two files: RhinoRenderV5.rhp and ToucanRenderV4.rhp

On both these files I again did Right Click / Show Package Contents

For ToucanRenderV4.rhp this gets me to Contents > Resources > en.lproj > Materials Library. In this folder I can still see all the original materials that were enclosed with the Toucan Renderer. They are all still here. The extension of these files is .tmf

For RhinoRenderV5.rhp this get me to Contents > Resources > en.lproj (there are several other folders for different languages in the resources folder) > Render Content > a number of folders, i.e. Environments, Metal, Plastic, Screen, etc. The extension of these files is .rmtl

My question is, is it safe to copy all the materials from the Toucan Materials Library and copy them to the appropriate folders under the Render Content folder for Rhino Render. It should be noted that the extensions of the Toucan material files and the Rhino material files are not the same.

I have been able to copy and paste some of the Toucan materials into my Rhino renderer inside the Materials Panel, but they ended up in the Custom materials section instead of the Standard materials, where I would like to have them.

The reason I want to do this, is that some of the Toucan materials seem sot work better for me than the Rhino materials. For instance the Standard Diamond material in Rhino render is not very good, the Toucan one for glass worked much better, because it also had refraction. I can’t seem to be able to add any refraction to the transparent materials like diamond, emerald, ruby and sapphire in Rhino render. If it is possible to add refraction to these transparent materials with Rhino Render, how do I do this?

ToucanRenderV4.rhp will be removed in the commercial release of Rhino for Mac. It is currently part of the current WIP release as a courtesy for those people who had started projects with Toucan. You should not use Toucan. It will disappear.

Toucan materials have additional attributes that are ignored by Rhino Render. If you use Toucan materials in a model, only the Rhino Render subset of attributes will have any effect.

All Rhino Render materials have an IOR (index of refraction) value. Is that what you are looking for?

The contents of the Rhinoceros.app folder belongs to Rhinoceros. You should not make any changes there. Any changes you make there will be deleted when you install another release of Rhino.

Thank you Marlin.

I think IOR is indeed what I was looking for. I did not know what that abbreviation stands for.

However some of the folders with certain attributes, don’t seem to be directly accessible from within the Materials Panel, like transparency, or the textures folder.

Those attributes are built into certain “Standard materials”, but what do I do if I want to create a new material from scratch with some of those same attributes like transparency. For instance I want to create a new precious stone that is different from a diamond, emerald, ruby or sapphire. How would I go about doing that?

In the Material Editor when I click on the + in the Custom materials section, I get a new default material. I right click on this and choose Edit library material. But then when I choose Transparency, because I want to create another precious stone besides the ones I have in the Standard materials, I am stuck. What do I do next?

Or am I going at this completely the wrong way? I am beginning to think that I may misunderstand what the transparency setting is supposed to be. It is beginning to dawn on me that it may have nothing to do with transparent materials like glass or precious stones, but more with things like creating chicken wire, metal mesh or something similar?

I could use some guidance.

Make a new material>set the transparency slider to 100%>set the IOR to 2.42 for diamond or look up the IOR of any material online and use that. You won’t see the refraction in the viewport since that has to be raytraced/rendered. If your gem material has a color just change the color of the material. Rhino Render is super basic so if you’re looking for light to sparkle through the gem (caustics), this won’t be possible.

Both are possible. If you want a wire material, use a black and white image in the transparency channel. The black areas will be see through. This is called a transparency map. See the “dot screen diagonal” material for an example.