V-Ray for Rhino

V-Ray for Rhino 3.6

Al Dean takes a look at the latest release of V-Ray for Rhino3D. With this product, has the Chaos Group created the ultimate photorealistic renderer for McNeel’s 3D modelling Swiss Army knife?

Rhino is hugely popular among open source Cycles renderer), there are a architects for its advanced sur- range of third-party vendors looking to add face modelling capabilities. It their own special brand of magic. can create incredible forms This month, we’re going to take an infrom scratch and import and export a depth look at the latest update to one of huge array of data types. It’s also very these — namely, V-Ray for Rhino — good value for money - the which costs £220 per year list price is 995 Euros – no and is developed by the subscription, no mainte- V-Ray for Rhino Hungarian team at Chaos nance costs - and this includes the powerful Grasshopper visual script■ £220 per year ■ chaosgroup.com / vray/rhino Group. If you’ve not come across V-Ray before, it’s essentially ing tool. a singular physically-based

The final reason for its rendering system that has popularity is, I suspect, the huge wealth been developed for integration in a wide of third-party add-ons that are available. spread of 3D modelling and visualisation One of the most popular classes of add-on systems. It’s currently available for 3ds is rendering and visualisation. max, Revit, Blender, SketchUp, Modo,

While Rhino has its own built-in render- Maya, Cinema 4D, Form-Z, and of course, ing tools and its own add-ons (Flamingo Rhino. So let’s dig into what it does, how it and more recently, McNeel has built in the does it and what you can produce with it.

If you’ve used Rhino with plug-ins before, you’ll know that installation is pretty straightforward — open up the Rhi file and it’ll sort itself out. Then place all your files where you need them.

It’s then a case of configuring V-ray how you want it — either running as default or, if you have shared resources for textures and materials (V-Ray makes sharing standardised materials very easy), then you’ll need to point the various folders to where they need to go.

Getting started Getting up and running with V-Ray for Rhino is pretty straightforward. You’ll find a new menu is added to the pulldown and a small toolbar gives you access to the most common Rhino integrated commands, including light creation and depth of field focus control. It’ll

also bring up the V-Ray dialog window. range of options, controls and parame- per year for access to the 600 or more

If you’ve used V-Ray for Rhino before, ters to let you do that, and there are also a real world, captured materials. That you’ll immediately notice that this por- number of shortcuts. charge comes every year. If you stop paytion of the interface has been dramati- First, the system is supplied with a ing, the materials are watermarked. cally reworked. The whole thing looks library of materials which you can use as and feels much easier to use, and consid- a starting point, most of which are suited Build your own materials ering that the workflow is split across to AEC workflows. If none of these options work, then you’ve two key dialogs (the operations inside Second, the web is your friend and got a full set of tools to dive in and build Rhino and the V-Ray dialog), it all holds there’s a wide range of downloadable your own materials from scratch. Of together nicely. materials for V-Ray (both free and paid) course, you don’t want to do this for every

As a last point, it’s worth noting that if – look out for the vismat format. These project, so V-Ray makes your materials a you need to switch the renderer in Rhino, can simply be opened up in V-Ray and lot more portable – both between an indiyou’ll find V-Ray for Rhino under the tweaked or used directly. vidual user’s projects and between memRender menu (look for Current Renderer). There’s also a newly added method of bers of a design group. This means that You’ll also need to switch your renderer importing from a standard file format one person who’s got all the mad materials viewport to use the V-Ray Interactive called MDL, which does much the same skills on your team could generate all of option from the view shading controls. thing, but may give you another source of its material definitions, enabling the team

So, shall we explore the set-up and ren- starter materials. to standardise on them. dering process? Assuming that you’ve got The other option is to use Chaos’ Rather than clogging up your project your geometry render ready to go, then the VRScans library. In essence, VRScans are with a huge library every time, the goal best place to begin is with adding here is to only add those materimaterials to that model. Material creation Material creation is possibly the most time-consuming aspect of ‘‘ V-Ray for Rhino is supplied with a library of materials which you can use as a starting point, most of which are als you might need to your V-Ray project. That keeps things nice, tidy and manageable, and is particularly useful if you are working on group projects, where othusing V-Ray in the context of suited to AEC workflows ers might need to jump in and Rhino. V-Ray has special requirements when it comes to material definitions. So, while you can take any physically measured materials that Chaos ’’ continue work. If there’s a downside to V-Ray, it’s not to do with Chaos Group’s existing Rhino materials you have in place makes available for download. If you’re work, but rather some of the clunky texand convert them to V-Ray materials looking for those 100% accurate materials ture mapping controls inside Rhino. You (using the included utility), the chances are and references, this is an excellent place to still need to use these to control your that you’re going to end up defining them start (though editability is limited). material and how it’s applied and the from scratch in the majority of instances. It is worth noting that the VRScans more complex your material, the more

The good news is that there is a wide library is a separate add-on, costing £260 complex this can get – for example, if

you’re running multi-layer materials or got a range of more traditional CG light- particularly useful for those working in using decals heavily. ing assets — point, spot and area lights — the architectural field. and there are IES lights, too. If you’ve not Lighting set-up come across IES lighting definition, then The V-Ray dialog and frame buffer There are two methods of working with you can use manufacturer-provided These two components are the focalV-Ray inside Rhino – using the existing datasets to build a very accurate repre- point for everything that V-Ray does. tools in Rhino then converting the assets sentation of a light. While Rhino provides the interaction (lights, materials and so on) or creating The combination of HDR environment with the geometry, it’s from the V-Ray them from scratch. lighting and manually created, tweaked dialog that materials are defined and

During our tests, we found that it was and positioned lights means that you applied, lights created and controlled, much quicker and easier to define your have a full set of lighting set-up descrip- and the scene defined. V-Ray assets from scratch, using the tion tools available at your disposal. It’s also where you’ll find some of the V-Ray native tools. This is particularly Interestingly, there are some tools availa- more advanced options for the system. true when it comes to lights. ble if your scenes feature multiples of the Some of these involve automation of Perhaps your starting point might be adding in a HDR image as the source of reflec‘‘ On the whole, V-Ray extends Rhino’s wellRhino to achieve specific rendering activities, but also to expose some of the more powtions, lighting and back- respected usefulness significantly. The erful aspects of V-Ray. ground to your scene. To do this with V-Ray’s tools is pretty simple, but they’re a little combination of these two products, in fact, is pretty damn impressive For example, while it’s possible to create an infinite plane using Rhino, V-Ray hidden away — you do it using the adaptive sphere light tool. same light that you’d like to control easi ’’ adds in a command to do this explicitly and once the ground plane is in place, you can then

This allows you to add in a marker ly. Using the new ‘instancing’ option, it’s add in the materials you want. using either a sphere or as a point, which now possible to have multiple lights in This is also where you define the spemakes it very hard to spot in the model your scene, all controlled from one light cifics of your output, both in terms of resviews. Strangely, the position you place in the V-Ray dialogs. This will come in olution, but also those ray tracing conthis in makes no difference, so I’m not too useful in many instances. trols that can make or break a project. sure why they’ve even bothered with the In our test projects, for instance, we While V-Ray for Rhino features an intergraphical widget. used a single light set-up to get the style active rendering window, which is per-

You then connect this widget up to your we wanted, then instanced it across eve- fect for previewing your work, as you chosen HDR image and boom, the lights go rywhere that a light was needed in the adjust and tweak your lights, materials on, your shadows start to resolve, and your light clusters. and model, the chances are that you’ll image immediately starts to look better. This gave us the control we needed, need higher resolution output.

Of course, alongside this, you’ve also from a single light and I’m sure it’ll prove During our tests, this was something

that immediately escaped me, but eventually I tracked it down as an option hidden away in the V-Ray dialog — proving, as ever, that it’s worth spending time working through the tutorials and help system.

Here, under the ‘save image’ option, you’ll find a toggle for both image resolution and for image saving (which allows you to add a location).

It’s also worth noting that there’s a curious workflow in terms of how you preview your resultant imagery. In the first instance, you can have a viewport in Rhino displayed as a progressive V-Ray preview. This is perfect for dialling in materials, lighting set-up and so on.

An alternative is to use the V-Ray buffer window. Once switched to interactive mode, this links to your chosen Rhino viewport, so geometry selections are easier during material set-up and you can take advantage of a denoiser that can strip some time out of your final renders.

Together, the interactive viewport, with Rhino running as per normal and four shaded views, and the V-Ray interactive frame buffer running alongside it, make for an ideal combination.

Then, when you want your final image, you kick off a non-interactive render to your required resolution – or indeed, add it to a batch for processing later.

Conclusion V-Ray has achieved legendary status among its many users and integrations into 3ds max, Maya and other standalone visualisation systems have long been on offer, are widely accepted and have significantly matured.

The integration with Rhino differs in the sense that Rhino is not a system intended for the viz professional, but instead for designers, whether they’re working in product design or architectural design.

The good news is that, in its last few releases, Chaos Group has put in a great deal of effort into improving the user experience. Gone are the more esoteric icons and operations that could confuse new users. These have been replaced with a clearly set-out strip of operations in a toolbar, with more advanced options neatly packaged up in the V-Ray dialog.

As a result, what we’ve ended up with is a set of tools that let you work with the design tool of your choosing (in this instance, Rhino) in order to create stunning imagery that might have previously required you to learn and use an entirely different set of tools.

While for visualisation professionals, this option might not replace your 3ds max plus V-Ray set-up, it will certainly let you share assets between the two systems, both in terms of materials and scene data.

Having a high-end rendering engine inside Rhino certainly makes a great deal of sense. After all, if you’re already using Rhino heavily in your work, you’ll be used to navigating some of its eccentricities and have probably established your own methods to achieve your goals, which work well for you.

And, on the whole, V-Ray extends Rhino’s well-respected usefulness significantly. The combination of these two products, in fact, is pretty damn impressive.

■ chaosgroup.com/vray/rhino

Rhino renderers: what other options are out there?

Rhino has its own built in renderer but, as anyone that’s tried it will know, it has its limitations.

McNeel’s decision to include the ray tracing Cycles engine from Blender came with Rhino 6, but still the system isn’t up to much. So what else is out there?

Product: Radeon ProRender Supplier: AMD Price: Free

AMD has been developing its free Radeon ProRender add-on for a number of systems for some time now. Computation can be done on both CPU and GPU, but the GPU is the favoured option.

Interestingly, the product isn’t restricted to AMD GPUs and will gain benefit from compute on Nvidia boards as well, although you’ll get the best performance from one of AMD’s cards.

Be careful, however, if you also have V-ray installed, as there’s current conflict between the two products. ■ pro.radeon.com Product: OctaneRender Supplier: Otoy Price: $589

Octane Render is a real-time renderer that Otoy bought out quite some time ago.

It was a pioneer in the GPU computation of rendered scenes, so has gained a reputation as being incredibly quick, particularly when using consumer-level GPUs.

At present, this is a more costly beast, but we’re hearing talk of licence changes coming with the Octane 4 release. These will presumably see a shift to a subscription-based deal, which could prove more attractive to new customers. ■ otoy.com Product: Maxwell Supplier: Next Limit Price: €695

Maxwell has been a well-respected rendering solution for a good decade or more and it has found a home in quite a number of organisations, particularly those focused on industrial design.

Alongside its integrations into SolidWorks, the Rhino variant works nicely with all of the controls you’d expect.

It is worth noting that Maxwell only works with Rhino 5. Additionally, unlike almost every other Rhino renderer, Maxwell supports the Mac version of Rhino. ■ nextlimit.com Product: TheaRender Supplier: Altair Price: $450

We hadn’t heard of this one, until we did a little digging. We were subsequently surprised to find out it was developed by an outfit call Solid Iris, but is owned by simulation software developer, Altair Engineering. (the acquisition of Solid Iris by Altair dates back to 2016.)

TheaRender for Rhino looks to support Rhino 5, includes all of the bells and whistles you would expect (HDR image support, physically based materials) and it takes advantage of your GPU for computation. ■ thearender.com