Thanks for your swift answer, Michael. When do you sleep? ;)

"> So I was thinking about using Rhino as a "bridge" between SU/MoI
> and Maxwell/Vray. Granted, bit of a weird workflow, but I find it apealling. ;)

That should work fine - you can also even copy and paste between MoI and Rhino and they share the same file format, so it is pretty easy to share data back and forth, it's not too weird! :)"

Mmm, sweet. Gonna be cool. Even more work, but hey, no pain, no gain. I'm quite looking forward to trying this!


"> ... but ... do I need to join them through some boolean command for
> them to render properly, or can I just slightly shove them into eachother?

For rendering if you have objects that have volume, you can usually just leave things as individual objects that are shoved through each other."

Fantastic. That should save me at least some time. Gotta check whether Rhino does instances. (Would be totally great!)

"If you have objects that are individual surfaces (instead of volume objects), those should usually be joined together at their common edges before rendering (so that the generated meshes will stitch together properly along the shared edge)."

I hate to admit it publicly, but this I don't understand. I blame the language barrier, not the fact that I never paid attention during geometry class ("I'll never need this.")! ;) What are "objects that are individual surfaces"? Objects of which the constituting elements weren't joined prior to being exported to Rhino or something? Or more like, say, two planes that have a common edge?

I'm hoping UV-ing and texturing in Rhino is something I can wrap my little brain around. :D Seems to be a lot of Rhino documentation around, though.

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

Hi stinkie,

> Or more like, say, two planes that have a common edge?

Yes - like that.

Like for example say you create a shape by sweeping some curves that are not closed, that creates a surface instead of a volume, like this:



It's sort of like a sheet.

Now say I create a second surface sheet adjacent to that, for example by extrusion:



These are now 2 separate objects (that's what I mean by "individual" surfaces). This is the kind of situation where you do need to use Join to glue them together into a single object that has a shared edge in it - that way that shared edge will get meshed without any holes or cracks appearing along the edge. That applies to MoI and Rhino both.

- Michael

Ah, I see! Thanks, Jonah and Michael. Have a nice weekend!