Hey Stinkie. What Michael is saying is that rendering enclosed volumes will give a good result if they completely penetrate each other. But if only touching along an edge (such as two surfaces sharing an edge, but not joined) then the render meshes are created independently of each other and will show cracks. If you don't plan to join or boolean them into on object, then at least make sure they penetrate into each other to hide those cracks... Of course if you are rendering glass, wax, etc then your techinique will not work...

And it's not weird at all to use Rhino as a render bridge. Rhino already has 6 (?) engines which plugin directly. And more engines are in development. McNeel just added curve piping (works in-viewport and at render-time) so curves are rendered as solid pipes. And they slipped out a prototype "Edge Softening" tool so hard-edged objects can be rendered with smooth edges even when they have no fillets! This only works if the engine developer hooks up the feature though. So VRay/Maxwell don't have it yet. But it works NICE NICE NICE in Brazil... :) Also, Nurbs UV Unwrapping is discussed for the future. No official announcement about this though, so don't hold me responsible if that doesn't happen!

Rhino does not have "instances" in the same manner as most polygonal modelers. But it has "block" support. So essentially you can texture/shade an object in one Rhino file, then insert the complete file as a block into another file where you plan to render. You can edit the block in the original file, and it can be updated in the rendering file. Blocks can be moved, rotated, scaled, deformed, etc and can still updated without a problem. Those transforms are not lost when you update the block. So no problem there.

jonah