Free stuff

So recently I had the chance to test out a new plug-in for Rhino. VSR Render is a real-time renderer which has the ability to deal with reflectivity better than rhino render and has some environmental mapping tools. These features make it a better render program to use in place of the default Rhino Render.

Default shaded view of a 3dm mouse file.

So, in the screen shot above you can see a model of a mouse that was supplied with the VSR Render Wizard. In the standard shaded view we have no reflectivity options and flat gray shades (unless you change layer color).

This is the Rhino render view while still in the view plane.

In the shot above I flipped on the Rhino render. This is how it looks while still in the viewing plane. Now we have some material shades assigned and can even apply textures to the object, but it still looks pretty plain looking.

This is the rendered view of the mouse using Rhino render.

The rendered view from Rhino render yields a very similar result to the render we saw while still in the viewing plane.

The rendered view using VSR Render.

What you see above is the rendered view with VSR Render enabled. I’ve not done anything to this object to alter the appearance once the file was opened. So what you see is what VSR Render does to a model by default. You’ll notice the reflectivity to a ground plane (which is added as part of the environment map) as well as a nice lighting setup for the shot as well. This is all done live. So if I move the model around it updates on the spot, whereas some renderers require you to re-render the shot before updates take effect.

Using VSR Render we can easily manipulate materials.

Now that VSR Render is enabled we can open up some of it’s control boxes and manipulate what we have in the render window. You can select individual materials assigned to the object and make them transparent, add reflectivity, refraction and shininess.

Using a custom environment in VSR Render

So with this control box we can load in our own images to use as backgrounds. It allows you to use a cube, sphere, or cylindrical shape for the image to be mapped to.

Adjusting the Ground Plane in VSR

In the environmental mapping tool we can also adjust the ground plane. In this case I made it slightly reflective and made sure it was set to receive casted shadows.

So overall this tool  can be pretty useful if you wish to see how your object will look inside of an environment or just want a live render view that is able to give a more detailed output much quicker than rhino render. If you want to test it out, it is currently free (as it is still in Beta) at VSR Render. Now, because it is still in Beta mode, there are currently no help documents, so if you want to try it you’ll just have to mess around and figure out the features on your own.

-Mike