Render

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Properties

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File

Properties

The Render page in Document Properties manages the Rhino Render settings for the current model.

Use the Rendering panel to access these settings without opening Document Properties.

Before you start the command

• On the

  Render

  menu, click

  Current Renderer

  , and then click

  Rhino Render

  .
  For information about assigning render materials to objects and layers, see Materials.

Current Renderer

Sets the current renderer. This can be the built-in Rhino Render or a plug-in.

View

Specify a source for the view.

Current Viewport

Renders the current viewport.

Specific Viewport

Select a viewport to render from the list.

Named View

Select a named view to render from the list.

Snapshot

Select a snapshot to render from the list.

Resolution and Quality

Dimensions

The aspect ratio displays to the right of the menu.

Viewport (

<size>)

Renders the active viewport the active viewport using the pixel size of the viewport.

Custom (

<size>)

Renders the active viewport using the custom resolution. Type the custom width and height resolution in pixels.

Preset sizes

Renders the active viewport the selected pixel resolution.

If you add a text file named render_sizes.txt to the folder where the Rhino executable (.exe) resides, Rhino Render and some other renderers will read this text file for custom render sizes.

Example:

// My custom render sizes
500,500
600,600
700,700
800,800
900,900

Lock to viewport aspect ratio

Maintains the aspect ratio of the viewport. When the height or width is changed, the other dimension changes in relation.

Size

Calculates the size of the image in the selected unit system based on the Resolution and DPI (“dots” per inch) settings. This is useful for determining the size of the image for printing.

Units

Sets the image size in pixels, inches, millimeters, or centimeters.

DPI

Image pixels (“dots”) per inch.

Quality

The Quality settings help to improve:

• Jagged edges and moiré problems.
• Noisy “grain” when using the Skylight, Polish, and Frost settings, rectangular and linear lights, and depth of field.
• Grain problems on high contrast textures viewed from distance.

Higher quality settings result in more rays being cast per pixel, and as a result the rendering time will increase. Prefer lower quality settings when setting up your scene, but higher settings when producing a final image for presentation purposes.

Quality=Draft quality (left), and Final quality (right).

Quality=Draft quality (left), and Final quality (right).

Rhino calculates each pixel in the rendered image by averaging several samples. This makes the image appear smoother, but also slows down rendering.

Backdrop

The backdrop is what you see directly in front of the camera if there are no objects in the way. The background is not 3‑D — it exists only on the screen.

Solid color

Displays a solid color.

To select the color for the background

• Click the .

Gradient

Displays a two-color gradient. The color for the top of the image background is the Solid color set above.

To select the color for the bottom of the background

• Click the .

360° Environment

Displays the portion of the current environment that the camera sees in the viewport.

New

Creates a new environment using a template from the library.

Edit

Edits the selected environment.

See: Environment Editor.

Duplicate

Copies the selected environment to a new environment with the same settings.

Wallpaper

Displays the current viewport wallpaper.

Wallpaper in perspective viewport.

Wallpaper in perspective viewport.

Stretch to fit

Fits the wallpaper to the rendered view.

Wallpaper at normal aspect ratio (left) and stretched to fit (right).

Wallpaper at normal aspect ratio (left) and stretched to fit (right).

Transparent background

The background is rendered with an alpha channel for transparency. The image must be saved to a file format that supports alpha channel transparency (.png, .tga, .tif).

Ground plane

Turns on the ground plane.

Ground Plane Settings

Opens the Ground Plane panel.

Use custom environment for reflections

Assigns a custom environment that will be reflected by objects in the scene.

New

Creates a new environment using a template from the library.

Edit

Edits the selected environment.

See: Environment Editor.

Duplicate

Copies the selected environment to a new environment with the same settings.

Default environments

No environment

The No environment setting applies a plain gray background.

Studio

The Studio environment offers soft lighting provided by a high-dynamic range image.

Studio lighting example (left) and hdr background (right).

Studio lighting example (left) and hdr background (right).

Lighting

Sun

Turns on the sun.

Sun Settings

Opens the Sun panel.

Skylight

Turns on skylight.

Skylight off (left) and Skylight on (right).

Skylight off (left) and Skylight on (right).

Intensity

Adjusts the skylight intensity.

Use custom environment for skylighting

Sets an environment that is used as sky light.

New

Creates a new environment using a template from the library.

Edit

Edits the selected environment.

See: Environment Editor.

Duplicate

Copies the selected environment to a new environment with the same settings.

Lights

Opens the Lights panel.

Use lights on layers that are off

Controls whether or not spotlights that are on hidden layers or that are hidden with the Hide command are rendered.

Wireframe

Render curves

Curve objects are rendered with the surfaces.

Render surface edges and isocurves

Surface isoparametric curves and edges are rendered with the surfaces. Edge thickness set in the Rendered viewport apply.

Render dimensions and text

Dimensions and texts are rendered with the surfaces.

Dithering and Color Adjustment

Dithering

The rendered image is usually produced at a higher color depth than monitors and low-dynamic-range file types like bitmaps like JPEG, PNG, BMP can reproduce. The most important effect this causes is banding, which is a quantization error. Dithering reduces quantization errors and so gets rid of banding.

Both dithering methods, generally do the same thing. Sometimes, one might be better than the other, but in general, Simple Noise is the best.

See: Wikipedia: Dither.

None

No dithering.

Floyd-Steinberg

The algorithm achieves dithering by diffusing the quantization error of a pixel to its neighboring pixels.

See: Wikipedia: Floyd-Steinberg dithering.

Simple noise

A random variation of brightness or color information in images.

See: Wikipedia: Image noise.

Gamma

Image files are color corrected so that they can be loaded byte-by-byte into the RGB pixels of a computer screen and look right on a monitor. This means that the color response of a standard image is non-linear, that is, it is gamma corrected. Gamma refers to the power function that is used to correct the image.

The Gamma value changes, and therefore corrects the output of the image.

See: Wikipedia: Gamma correction.

Advanced Rhino Render Settings

Render acceleration grids

Screen grid, cell size

The width and height of each grid cell in pixels.

The smaller the grid cell size, the more memory it takes and the more memory it takes to build, but the faster the final render.

Spotlight shadow grid size

The shadow ray is the ray shot from the scene towards each light when the intersection between the eye ray and the scene is found. Usually the lions share of the render time is spent tracing the shadow rays.

To increase calculation speed for the spotlight shadow rays, the render plug-in divides the spotlight cone into rectangular regions, and again builds a sorted list of the objects within each region. This speed increase only applies to spotlights, because they are very similar to the viewports, the light location is like the camera location, and the light cone defines the viewport.

The spotlight grid is defined in number of grid cells instead of pixels, because there is no pixel size associated with lights.

Self-shadowing prevention

Prevents self-shadowing artifacts. When the intersection between the eye ray and the scene is found, the intersection point is moved (offset) towards each light before calculating the shadow ray. The reason is there’s always some numerical fuzz in calculating the intersections, and if the point is not offset, the shadow ray might hit the very same polygon again, putting shadows in wrong places. You can see the self shadowing artifacts if you set the setting to zero, and then render the scene.

Ray offset

The amount of offset.

Object and polygon bounding volume hierarchy

A binary space partitioning (BSP) tree is another way to increase rendering speed. Instead of testing each polygon one-by-one, the objects and polygons are divided into a tree-like hierarchy based on the location in space.

The renderer builds multiple trees, one that contains the whole object bounding boxes, and one per object that contains the polygons for that object.

The BSP tree takes some time to build and takes some memory. A deeper tree may take longer to build, but may render faster. A shallow tree is faster to build, but may take a long time to render.

Max tree depth

Controls how many times the scene can be subdivided when building the tree.

The tree depth defaults to Auto, and node size to 1. There should be no need to change these settings unless you render a scene that is so huge that Rhino runs out of memory using the default settings.

Target node size (objects/polys)

Defines the optimal size for each node that contains the objects or polygons.

Transparency

Max bounces

The transparency bounces setting controls how many times rays that hit transparent objects are traced: 12 means a stack of 12 transparent sheets will render properly, but the 13th sheet will render opaque. To keep the render times reasonable, the limit is 15.

Reflectivity gradient

Max bounces

The reflectivity bounces setting controls how many times rays that hit reflective objects are traced. To keep the render times reasonable, the limit is 15.

See also

Render the objects using the current renderer.

Render your model scene

 

 

 

Rhinoceros 6 © 2010-2020 Robert McNeel & Associates.