V6: some questions about rendering and rendered viewport

Hello, I just bought rhino6 and I have a couple of questions about the rendering engines.
In the viewport I can choose between “rendered” and “raytraced”, the last seems to be cycles (it appears in the bottom of the rendered window), what’s the first? the old engine?.
Just testing it seems than “rendering” itself uses cycles (it is similar to the raytraced viewport) while the “classical” render is missing - so the “rendered” viewport is almost useless: all the efforts to setup materials in rhino are lost when rendering, because it uses a different engine.
This is all inferred by attempts, because the menus are not clear on the matter.
1. I wish I can choose to render with both main engines not only in the viewport.
Then when you choose an engine you also have to stick to its materials (you cannot switch from vray to maxwell to cycles without resetting all materials and lights).
Did I understand correctly?
2. I wish a way to use different engines without resetting averything each time.

Rendered is OpenGL-based rendering.

Rhino materials should look pretty similar between Rendered and Raytraced - the most obvious differences with glass/gem/transparent and reflective materials. The first group because they just look very different, the second because Rendered doesn’t do inter-object reflections. I think both are slated to be improved in v7.

Rendering is in v6 the old Rhino Render, which is a completely different render engine. It is not based on Cycles.

  1. What are the main engines? Are you referring to Rendered and Raytraced? For materials to be as similar between different rendering solutions you should stick to the Rhino materials provided, preferrably not Rhino Custom. If you want to render out a Raytraced or Rendered viewport to a file you can use _ViewCaptureToFile. You’ll be able to change resolution as well.

  2. See first part of answer to 1. You should stick to Rhino lights and materials as much as possible.

addendum: for v7 Cycles is slated to replace the old engine that powers both v5 and v6 Rhino Render.

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Thank you.
So today we can’t use Cycles as rendering engine, it only works in the raytraced viewport.
Let me explain better point 1: as “main engines” I wanted to refer to all the engines available.
Rhino supports any number of rendering engine (like vray, maxwell, thea…) but i cannot use more than one in the same file, right? Because once I choose I have to stick to that specific format of materials and lights. So I cannot switch rendering engine easilly: I have to reassign the new family of materials and change lights, loosing all the previous job.
So I would like the ability to map a generic material (say “wood flooring”) to different materials (shall I tecnically say shaders?), one for each available engine, so the switch became easy, or at least you won’t loose the previos work (same for lights).

wood flooring (rhino generic reference)=
    "wood" (rhino)
    "parquet" (maxwell)
    "oakwood" (vray)
    "standard_wood" (Cycles)
    […]

so when switching the render engine I can find previous materials back.
I guess the switch of the rendering engine may be considered useless, but it also seems to me quite an easy implementation (of course I may be wrong).
Does it make sense?

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This is an interesting idea, to automatically map between existing engine-specific materials. But the theory is that using the Rhino materials (Rhino Custom, Glass, Metal, Plastic, Gem, Plaster, Paint) each engine should look more or less the same. That way you don’t have to have a special list with references to engine-specific implementation of materials.

For v7 we are thinking of introducing a PBR-based material definition, which is the current standard and probably would yield better results with conversions.

Indeed Cycles is in v6 only in the viewport as Raytraced, but you get exactly the same rendering with _ViewCaptureToFile and _ViewCaptureToClipboard is you would with the (currently blocked) Cycles for Rhino plug-in. The only difference is that you don’t get the result in a separate Render Window - the code creating the render is exactly the same. As such Raytraced, and thus Cycles, can be used as a render engine.

/Nathan

ok, very clear, thank you very much.