Rhinoceros

High-quality presentation is critical to most design projects. Rhino 5 has greatly enhanced the rendering tools in both the basic Rhino Renderer and support of plug‑in renderers. Including major enhancements to:

• Rhino Renderer
• Materials, textures, and environments
• Texture mapping (Watch the video...)
• Views (cameras)
• Lighting
• Mesh modifiers
• Post-rendering effects
• Animation

Rhino Renderer

New features

• ApplyCustomMapping - Generates custom texture mapping by projecting one object's texture coordinates to another.
• Bake - Gathers an object's textures and decals into a bitmap file and assigns that bitmap as object's texture.
• Basic Materials now support:
  • Reflectivity
  • IOR
  • Procedural textures
  • High-Dynamic-Range (HDR) images
  • Blend material
  • Composite material
  • Emission color
  • Ambient color
  • Diffuse lighting
• ComputeVertexColors - Evaluates material texture color for each mesh vertex and sets a vertex color with the corresponding color.
• ContentFilter - Allows control over which types of content display in the material, environment, and texture editors.
• Decal - Applies an image over a selected portion of an object.
• EnvironmentEditor - Adds and edits rendering environments.
• Find missing textures - When the rendering starts, if textures referred to in the model are not where the renderer can find them, a dialog box provides a list of the missing textures with some options for browsing.
• GroundPlane - Opens the Ground Plane panel to set ground plane options.
• Libraries - Opens the Libraries panel where materials, textures, and environments can be stored.
• MatchMapping - Matches the texture mapping properties of a selected object to another specified object. A Match button also appears in the Texture Mapping dialog box.
• MaterialEditor - Opens the Material Editor panel.
• RPC - Support for RPC objects added. Rich Photorealistic Content (RPC) describes the software and content associated with ArchVision's image-based rendering (IBR) technology, that incorporates photo image data into 3‑D computer graphics environments.
• RPCSetAnimationFrame - Sets the animation frame number for an RPC object so that walking/moving people animations work.
• Saving textures in Rhino files is now an option.
• SynchronizeRenderColors - Updates object material colors so they match with their current display colors.
• Unwrap - Defines how an object's render mesh will be split and laid out in UV space.
• UVEditor - Edits the layout of a render mesh in UV texture space. In UV space, the render meshes can be joined and split, and their control points edited.

Enhancements

• ApplyBoxMapping - New Capping option.
• A BoundingBox option has been added for all mapping types.
• MappingWidget
  • Name changed from MappingOn.
  • Gumball interface improved for mapping widgets.
  • Mapping widgets now display u‑ and v-directions.
  • PointsOn: Now turns on mapping widget grips.
  • Textures now update in real time when widgets are moved or values in the mapping dialog are changed.
• MappingWidgetOff - Name changed from MappingOff.

• The Named Views, often called cameras, have a new Widget interface. This visual representation of a named view can be used to place or edit the camera and target location and to set the field of view.
• Two-Point Perspective is now supported in viewports and rendering.

Sun and Skylight are now supported in the basic Rhino Renderer and also in the Rendered viewport mode.

New commands:

• Lights - Opens the Lights panel.
• Sun - Opens the Sun panel.

Enhancements:

• EditLightByHighlight - Now prompts for a new light.
• New Target and Dolly grip points have been added to the light object to assist in placing and moving light objects.
• Lights have an intensity setting separate from their color.

Render-time mesh modifiers add small details without substantially increasing the Rhino file size.

New commands

• ApplyCurvePiping - Adds a render mesh around a curve.
• ExtractPipedCurve - Extracts the mesh created by the ApplyCurvePiping command.
• ApplyDisplacement - Adds displacement to a render mesh based on a bitmap or procedural texture.
• ShowRenderMesh - Temporarily displays the render mesh for selected objects.
• ApplyEdgeSoftening -  Adds edge-softening on the render mesh.
• ApplyShutLining - Uses a curve to add a groove to a render mesh to show mold lines or shut lines.

New Render window has post-rendering image processing tools:

• Save and open Rhino Image Files (.rimage). This proprietary lossless image file format stores all the data rendered by the render engine, including color, alpha, depth, normal channels. The high-dynamic-range data can be post-processed and saved to other formats including .HDR and .EXR.
• New commands include:
  • RenderOpenLastRendering - Opens the last automatically saved rendered image in the Render window.
  • RenderOpenRenderImage - Opens a previously saved .rimage file in the Render window.
• Image post-processing tools:
  • Exposure (gamma correction and tone mapping)
  • Fog
  • Glow
  • Glare
  • Depth of field
  • Points, curves, isocurves, and annotation
  • Hue
  • Saturation
  • Focal blur
  • Gaussian blur
  • Noise

Animation

There are many advanced rendering plug-ins available for Rhino 5, including Flamingo nXt, Brazil, Neon, Penguin, V-Ray, Maxwell, Air, Thea, and VSR realtime.