3D Paint allows for painting directly onto a 3D object. This is a great way to add dirt, ageing, corrosion and other arbitrary textures onto local areas of geometry.

Phil uses the example of a metal casting, modelled in Rhino 7, and shows step-by-step methods for adding dirt, corrosion and paint wear in KeyShot 11 using 3D Paint. Phil also shows how to set up the initial model in Rhino 7 to ease the process.

KeyShot 11 – 3D Paint Video Tutorial

Learn more and KeyShot Training

To learn more about KeyShot you can visit the KeyShot page on the Simply Rhino website. If you’re interested in learning KeyShot then you can find details of our 1-day KeyShot Essentials training course too, and if you’re after more project focused training for KeyShot then contact us, we’re always happy to help.

KeyShot 11 Trial Version

If you’d like to try KeyShot 11 for free then you can download a trial version below, just choose your KeyShot 11 installer platform and follow the instructions:

• Download and Launch KeyShot from the installers listed above. Start KeyShot and select ‘Start a Trial‘
• Log into your KeyShot Cloud Account, or create a new account if you do not already have one
• Select ‘Activate with a trial code‘
• Enter your Trial code as: SIMPLYRHINOKSTRIAL

The post Rhino 7 and KeyShot 11 – New KeyShot Feature, 3D Paint appeared first on Rhino 3D.

Create easy part animations with KeyShot 10

This is an animation where we can move the model, or parts of the model, against a timeline. In Rhino 7 we can animate the camera but not move the model or parts – so if you have KeyShot this opens up the possibility of creating easy part and keyframe animations.

Phil also looks at custom rotations (i.e. those not aligned with KeyShot’s X,Y,Z axis). So, if you’ve come unstuck with custom rotations or hinge positions in KeyShot in the past then there is a work-around included in this video.

You can watch the video here and if you would like to follow along using the video transcript you’ll find this at the bottom of this page.

To learn more about KeyShot you can visit the KeyShot product page on the Simply Rhino website, you can also find out about our KeyShot training options, including a 1-day KeyShot essentials training course delivered by Phil, details of that course can be found here.

If you are interested in our previous Rhino and KeyShot video material you can find more on this site, including a recent video in which we take a look at creating a Sun Study Animation with Rhino v7 data from KeyShot 10.

Rhino 3D v7 and KeyShot 10 Part Animation Tutorial Video Transcript

Hi, this is Phil from Simply Rhino and in this short video I’m going to take a look at creating a part animation in KeyShot 10. This is an animation where we can move the model or parts of the model against a timeline. The starting point is going to be in Rhino 7 and with this engineering model of a dewatering pump. In Rhino 7 we can animate the camera but not move the model or parts – so if you have KeyShot this opens up the possibility of creating easy part and keyframe animations.

All of the steps in this video are fairly straight forward, however I am going to look at how we handle the case where a rotating or hinging component is inclined at an angle – i.e. not in line with the KeyShot X, Y, or Z axes. So, if you’ve come unstuck with custom rotations in KeyShot there’s a work around included later in this video.

Let’s now take a look at the finished KeyShot video to see what we’re aiming for. The video starts with the main yellow engine cover being raised up whilst the side door opens. At the same time, the model is rotated. A pump impeller component is moved forwards, to expose the pump detail below – before this and the yellow cover fade out. Finally, there’s a camera movement so we can see down onto the pump and engine assembly.

Before I start, let’s take a look at the KeyShot interface with the completed animation. In the animation window at the bottom, you’ll see that I have 8 animation elements that start and finish at various points in the timeline. Once these are created, I can see and edit their properties in the window in the bottom right. I can also scrub through the timeline to get a quick idea of how my animation is progressing.

Let’s go back to Rhino now, and first of all I want to look at how this model is organised. For still images I would usually use Rhino’s Layers to separate out the components on a per material basis, as this would make it easier to apply the same material to multiple components in Keyshot. However, here I’m going to use sublayers (or parent and child layers as they are sometimes called) to contain, for example, all the components that are included in the engine cover assembly that I want to hinge upwards in the animation.

The other thing I want to do in Rhino is to create a ‘helper object’ that will make it easy for me to hinge this side door that is inclined at 5 degrees to the vertical. I’m going to Hide the hinge pin and then I’ll create a straight line that snaps between the top and bottom of the hinge centres. This line is inclined at 5 degrees to the vertical, and I’ll now mark the centre of this line and rotate it about it’s centre by 5 degrees so that the line is now vertical. Finally, I’ll use the Pipe command to create a simple solid from this vertical line and push this solid onto its own layer called ‘Helper’.

Now, this may seem a strange or unnecessary procedure, but the issue in KeyShot is this. When I pick a local hinge point on Rhino geometry in KeyShot, for example the centre of this line, then KeyShot will only recognise a point in space for rotation and any such rotation will be relative to KeyShot’s X,Y and Z axes. In order to get around this get around this, what I need to do is introduce an object into KeyShot that has a centre about this point. I can then rotate the object in KeyShot and, once rotated, KeyShot will then understand the relative rotated X,Y and Z directions of the part and I can use it to describe the axis of rotation for my side door.

So, once I have my helper object completed and I’ve checked through all the layers then I can go to my KeyShot 10 Live Linking plug-in and I can send the model to KeyShot.

Okay, so the model is now in KeyShot and first I want to go to set-up a few basic things. First, I’ll got to ‘Image’ and here I want to make this image the same ratio as a 1920 by 1080 HD image which will be the final video output resolution. So I’ll set this to 960 by 540.

Next I’ll go into ‘Lighting’ and choose ‘Product’. Then I’ll go into ‘Environment’ and here I’ll use ‘Overhead Array 4K’ as the lighting set-up and in the ‘Environment’ tab on the right I’ll choose a white colour for the background. I’ll turn on the ground reflections and in the ‘Scene’ I’ll pick the complete ‘Model Set’, go to ‘Position’ and make sure that this is snapped onto the ground.

Next, I’ll go to ‘Camera’ and I’ll manipulate the view to give me a starting position and I’ll ‘Save’ this camera position as ‘Animation’.

Now I can start adding materials to the scene, so I’ll expand the ‘Model Set’ and you’ll see we have exactly the same layer configuration here as we did in Rhino. I’ll go to my ‘Materials’ on the left and select ‘Metallic Paints’ and I’ll drag the metallic yellow paint onto the engine cover.

I’m just going to suppress some ‘Layers’ here and let’s leave on ‘Side Door’ and the main ‘Bund Fabrication’. Now, I’m going to have the same grey material on the side door and on the grey part of the Bund Fabrication and, of course, I want to avoid creating duplicate materials. I’ll apply the standard grey paint to the Bund Fabrication, now if I drag from the Library again to the Side Door then I’ll get a duplicate grey material – but if I go to my material selection down here and drag the material from here then I won’t create a that duplicate.

Okay so now I’ve added all the materials I want to add and it’s time to start creating the animations and if you don’t see the ‘Animation’ window at the bottom here you can get this by going to the ‘Window’ menu and selecting ‘Animation’.

I’m just going to go to the ‘Side Door’ here and turn off that ‘Helper Object’ so I can just see the parts that I want to animate. The first area I want to look at is the yellow Engine Cover. The geometry for the hinges exists in the model, so we can use the hinge pins as a rotation point in KeyShot. I’ll go to the ‘Animation Wizard’ and pick ‘Rotation’.  Then I’ll go to ‘Next’ and then I can specify the part of the model that I want to animate – and this is the ‘Main Cover’ here. The Next panel is where we actually set up the animation and the first thing I need to do is to define a ‘Pivot Point’. So, I need to select ‘Pick’ and go to the ‘Main Cover’ and then go down to ‘Pin’ which is the controlling layer for the hinge pins. Now there’s actually two of these pins but KeyShot will just work out the centre of those two objects. I’ll select 70 degrees for the Rotation and I can choose ‘Ease In’ and ‘Ease Out’ which means that I’ll get a sort of damping down of the movement at the start and end of the rotation.

I’m not going to worry too much about that time or duration here because I can do this just by dragging in the timeline. I’ll drag out the animation to 15 seconds and if I scrub the timeline, I can see the animated object.  

So, now I’ve got the first part of the animation done and I’m going to look next at creating another rotation animation this time for the ‘Side Door’ and remember that this is the part that is inclined at 5 degrees to the vertical. So first of all I’m going to turn on the ‘Helper Object’ that I created earlier and then I’m going to turn off the other elements in the model.

I’ll go to ‘Camera’ and choose ‘Free Camera’ so I can manipulate the view, just so I can see everything a little easier. Then I’ll go to the ‘Move’ tool, pick ‘Rotate’ and select the ‘Helper’ cylinder as the ‘Pivot Object’ making sure that I have a ‘Local Axis’ and a ‘Centre Pivot Point’ selected. I’ll now see the Rotation gizmo is aligned to the ‘Helper’ and I can now rotate the ‘Helper’ by -5 degrees in Y.

Now I can add in the animation using the ‘Helper Object’ as the axis that I want to rotate about. I’ll open the ‘Animation Wizard’ and choose ‘Rotation’. The part I want to rotate is the whole of the Side Door assembly and for the Pivot Point here I want to go to ‘Pick’ and select ‘Helper’ and choose the actual geometry on the sublayer here – the Helper Object itself.

I’ll Rotate about Z and I’ll choose -70 and hit ‘Finish’. If I scrub through the timeline it’s a little difficult to see so let’s switch to Free Camera and then enable the ‘Geometry View’ and manipulate around here a bit so I can confirm that I’ve got the axis of rotation set correctly. That all looks good, so I’ll go back to the ‘Animation’ camera and I’ll adjust the length in the Timeline.  I want this animation to end at 11 seconds – so I’ll drag the end out here and I want it to start at 4 seconds. So that’s the second part of the animation done.

Let’s look now at some of the simpler elements in the animation. You can see that, as I scrub the timeline marker here – the engine cover raises upwards then it moves out of the frame. Now, I am going to change the view a little later on, but I still don’t want to see the cover chopped off like this. So what I’m going to do is to introduce a ‘Fade’ and I’m going to start that Fade at 8 seconds; if I move the timeline marker to 8 seconds and then go into the Animation Wizard and choose ‘Fade’ then, that Fade animation will start at where the timeline marker is – so at 8 seconds.

The part that I want to Fade here is the ‘Main Cover’ – and that’s all the components inside the main cover – and I’ll go to ‘Next’ and I want to give this a duration of 5 seconds and I want to fade from the default 100% to 0%. I can now see this Fade as the cover moves up and it’s already looking better.

I’m going to change the title of this element here and  I’m going to call this ‘003 Cover Fade’. I can do this over on the left side here or I can pick the actual animation element and change the title here – it doesn’t matter which do.

Next up, as the cover raises up you’ll see in a moment that there is a box here which sits on top of the front coupling for the pump and I want to move this box forwards so I can see some of the impeller casting underneath. I’m going to do this with an animation called a ‘Translation’ which is very simply a movement of the part and I want to start this at 9 seconds. So, again I’ll move my timeline to here and go to the ‘Animation Wizard’ and select ‘Translation’. The part that I want to choose for this is in ‘Pump Installation’ and it’s called ‘Front Coupling Box’ – I’ll see it highlighted there – then I’ll go to ‘Next’ and I can set the parameters for this – now I want to move it about its own local origin and the translation therefore will be in the Y axis to move this forward and backwards.

To move it forwards from the pump I know that from previous movements in the model I need a minus value here so I’m going to move that -900 millimetres and the duration for this is going to be 4 seconds. I can ‘Ease In’ and ‘Ease Out’ if I want and I’ll hit ‘Finish’. Let’s take a look at this and drag through here and I can see that part coming forward and that all looks okay. I’ll just change the name of this here to ‘004 Move Front Coupling’ and then I’m just going to move this full animation forwards slightly so it starts at 7 seconds tablet so it just moves a little earlier

Next, I want to do something similar with this than I have with the Main Engine Cover and that is to fade it out. I’ll start that at 9 seconds and go to the Animation Wizard and select ‘Fade’, then I’ll choose the part of the model set I want here – so it’s ‘Pump Installation Front Coupling Box’ –  and I want this to have a 4 second duration and I want it to fade from 100% to nothing. I’ll rename this as ‘005 Fade Front Coupling’.

What I want to do now is to rotate the whole object slightly, so that as the animation progresses, I start to see the assembly a little bit more from the front. To achieve this, I’m going to add a ‘Turntable’ animation. So, I’ll go to the ‘Animation Wizard’ again and I’ll choose ‘Turntable’. What’s important to understand here, is that I’m animating the object not orbiting the camera around the object. I want to start this Turntable Animation at 0 and I want to have a 13 second duration. The centre of rotation is going to be the centre of the model, and I want to go counter clockwise and I’ll just try rotating by 20 degrees so that it’s a fairly subtle movement. So, I’ll finish that animation segment and see how this looks.

The end shot of this animation is going to be with the camera looking down onto pump and engine assembly and to achieve this I’m going to do two separate camera animations. I’m going to start by tilting the camera upwards so it’s looking down onto the pump and engine assembly and then to make sure that the model stays in the centre of the frame I’ll create a translation to move the camera across the model.

I’ll start with the incline element of the camera animation and I’ve got my timeline marker set at 7 seconds which is where I want the animation to start. I’m going to open up the ‘Animation Wizard’ and I’m going to choose ‘Inclination’ and you can see in what happens here with this little animation at the bottom – the camera pivots around its target. The Camera that I want to choose is of course is the ‘Animation’ camera and I want to start this at a bit later than I just said – so let’s say 8 seconds and let’s give it a duration of 10 seconds which will make the animation slightly longer overall. The rotation that I want to end up with here is going to be 30 degrees – now to see this I can move the Timeline Marker with the Animation Wizard active and I can see the camera starting to move – so I can kind of rain this back a bit and I’ll set it to 30 degrees. This is the view I was looking for but of course I need to be seeing the model further up into the frame and I can do this with a separate translation. So, let’s finish this and Rename this element 007 Camera Incline.

Starting at the same point I now want to add the second camera animation here I want this to be a Translation and again it’s the same ‘Animation’ camera that I want to use here. I’ll set the global axis here I’ll keep the start at 8 seconds – this was defined my Timeline Marker position – and I want to have a 10 second duration.

I’ll move the Animation Wizard out of the way and scrub the Timeline Marker to the end of the animation segment and then I can choose my Y value here – now the slider will respond to the initial starting number here and 1 is too small so I’ll start with 300 and then start moving the slider whilst watching the result update in the preview window. I’ll end up with a value of 670 here which puts the assembly in the middle of the frame. Lets’ finish that up and I’ll rename this element 008 Camera Translate.

I can render out a Preview of the Animation by using this little button here – and this will create a small animation which is more detailed than the Live Preview window but takes considerably less time to render out than a full animation. Let’s fast forward to the end of the Preview creation and I can now Play the Preview and check that everything looks okay.

So that all looks good, and you’ll see that I can also scrub through the timeline in the Preview too. This Preview can be saved for reference, you might want a colleague or client to see this for example, and this can be done by clicking on the Save icon here.

So, when I’m happy with everything I can render out the Animation. I’ll go to ‘Render’ and select ‘Animation’ and I want to check that I have the correct output resolution set here -1920 by 1080. I can Render out either the ‘Work Area’ (which is between these two triangular markers in the timeline) or the entire animation but in this case that produces exactly the same number of frames.

I can output either as a pre-packaged Animation or a set of numbered still frames. I generally favour just outputting frames as this lets me add corrections and adjustments in by automating Photoshop if necessary. I can set the file type and the quality here and I can either add the this to a Queue to Render later or Render immediately.

So, that’s about all I wanted to cover in this video. Thanks for watching, and please feel free to leave any comments below. If you’ve found this video useful then please hit the ‘like’ button and, remember that to keep up with all the latest developments in Rhino and KeyShot then you can subscribe to this channel. At Simply Rhino we offer training for Rhino and all its key plug-ins including, of course, KeyShot – so check out our website for more details.

Thanks again for watching and I’ll catch up with you in the next video.

The post Rhino 7 and KeyShot 10 Part Animation Video Tutorial appeared first on Rhino 3D.

In this Rhino 3D video, Phil Cook from Simply Rhino looks at Rendering improvements in Rhino v7. This includes the ‘Cycles’ Raytrace Render and how we can add Denoiser elements with the new Package Manager in Rhino 7. Finally, the new Physically Based Materials are discussed.

Watch this Rhino 7 Rendering, Denoiser and Physically Based Materials video here (if you’d like to follow the video transcript then you’ll find it at the foot of this page):

Other videos looking at new Rhino v7 features are:

Rhino 3D v7 – QuadRemesh – a quick introduction

Rhino 3D v7 – SubD Modelling in Rhino for Mac Video Tutorial

Rhino 3D v7 Rendering, Denoiser and Physically Based Materials Video Transcript:

Hi, I’m Phil from Simply Rhino and in this short video, I’m going to take a look Rendering in Rhino 7. I’ll look at the ‘Cycles’ Raytrace Render and how we can add Denoiser elements with the new Package Manager in Rhino 7. Finally, I’ll look at the new Physically Based Materials.

Version 7 features significant improvements to rendering and, just as with Version 6, Rhino features a ‘Rendered’ Viewport which could be considered a sort of a preview of the ‘Raytraced’ Viewport. This ‘Raytraced’ or ‘Cycles’ mode allows for proper calculations of Reflections, Transparency, Refraction, Translucency etcetera. This Raytraced view mode, whilst being a live mode, does take some time to generate and here because of time limitations I’ve reduced the number of Render passes from 1000 to 500 and speeded up the video.

If I go to the ‘Rhino Options’ and select ‘Cycles’ you’ll see that I can accelerate the Raytrace mode either via CPU or GPU and on the machine that I’m using here my Quadro P3000 card is selected – as it gives better performance than the CPU, but you can also see that now in Version 7 we have a setting called OPTIX and this should let us take advantage of NVIDIA’s RTX GPU technology. Essentially these are graphics cards that are purpose built for accelerating Ray Tracing and we hope to be looking at these in the new year with the help of PNY Europe, but for now we’re using NVIDIA CUDA acceleration.

The next change in Version 7 is that now, when you select the render button from Rhino, it’s the Cycles Raytrace render that is being used; now that may seem fairly obvious but in Version 6, pressing ‘Render’ gave us the older legacy renderer. The ‘Render’ tab here on the right is where you set your variables for the Render, so for example, the output size, the quality settings, Ground Plane and Environmental Settings. So, I’ll hit the ‘Render’ button and we’ll see the Render Process start and the ‘Frame Buffer’ window appear and this will also confirm that I’m using my Quadro card for acceleration – it’s worth noting that rendering this way should be more efficient than rendering in the ‘Raytraced’ Viewport.

Now with any path tracing or Raytracing, whether it’s Cycles, V-Ray or KeyShot, the results tend to be noisy and it takes a certain number of passes, and therefore time, before this noise starts to dissipate.  If you are familiar with V-Ray or KeyShot then you’ll know that these now feature ‘Denoiser’ components that can help to clean up this noise meaning that we can get viable results with less render passes. The good news is that there are now Denoiser components available for Cycles in Rhino and also that these work really well.

These are not installed by default and to do this I’m going to show you another new feature in Rhino 7, and that’s called the ‘Package Manager’. From my ‘New in Rhino 7’ tab I’ll select ‘Package Manager’ and once this is launched I’ll search for ‘Denoiser’ and you’ll see I have two denoiser components that I can use on this particular machine – an Intel Denoiser and an NVIDIA Denoiser. The Intel Denoiser will use CPU and the NVIDIA Denoiser will use GPU -so I’ll install both of these and restart Rhino. It’s also worth making sure that your NVIDIA graphics card driver is up to date in order to run the NVIDIA Denoiser.

I’m back now with my restarted Rhino and if I chck in ‘Package Manager’, I can verify that both components have been installed. Now, I’m going to spin this view around so that I can get to a more shadowy area in the image where there will naturally be more noise in the render and I’ll increase the size of this window slightly now. I’ll go over to my ‘Render’ Panel and choose ‘Viewport Resolution’ and ‘Good Quality’ and leave the other settings at pretty much Default and I’ll hit the ‘Render’ button so we can see the render starting to progress now, going through the various passes, and I’ll just leave it to render out a few more samples and then we can look at the noise.

The two Denoiser Components that I installed are here on this side panel and the small checkbox here removes them from the list and, I can add them back in again here. These are all the ‘Post Effects’ that I can add and I’ll add the Intel denoiser back in again. So, let’s start with the Intel denoiser – I’ll apply that and you’ll see how it smooths out the noise and if I turn it off again you’ll see that the noise comes back. The NVIDIA Denoiser is, of course, going to use the GPU and we’re already rendering with the GPU – this builds and behaves slightly differently to the Intel Denoiser but the overall effect is pretty much the same, so again smoothing out that noise.

If I just Zoom in here and turn off the Denoiser then we’ll see the noise more clearly – now we could, of course, clean up this noise with lots of render passes but of course that takes time and so here the denoiser is effectively taking areas of similar tone and smart blurring those together to remove the noise. At the moment the render has only done a few passes, and you can see that perhaps too much detail is being lost and we won’t be able to resolve that detail until we’ve done a few more passes but you get the general idea here – that this is a really good way of being able to produce a viable Raytrace render in much shorter order i.e. with fewer render passes. The result is very similar to the Denoiser that we see in V-Ray for example. In windows we can use GPU for accelerating the render and for denoising if you’re using a Mac, however, then there is no GPU acceleration for rendering and the only denoiser you can use is the Intel component – however as you can see here Cycles makes full use of all the available CPU cores on a Mac and the Intel denoiser is very effective in reducing Raytrace render times.

Another new rendering feature in Rhino 7 is the inclusion of ‘Physically Based Materials’ and when I navigate to the ‘Object Information’ tab here and select a Material you’ll see that I have the new ‘Physically Based’ option. Physically Based or PBR materials are a compact format that allows a single material type to define materials that would usually need separate definitions – so for example, diffuse, glossy, specular, dielectric, metals, etcetera. Physically Based Materials can be considered as being platform agnostic and cross platform and you’ll see that they are popping up now in many popular programmes such as V-Ray and Unreal.

When we choose the Physically Based Material in Rhino you’ll see that we have a basic level of control by default and we can also expand upon this by going to the detailed settings here. We can create these materials from scratch but there’s an increasing amount of materials available online – many of these being free – and an example of this would be ‘CGBookcase.com’ – when we download a material it will often have a series of Texture Maps that are used to create the Physically Based Material. Here, I’m going to create a gravel texture that I’ve downloaded from CGBookcase. I’ll start with a new Physically Based definition in Rhino and select ‘Add Textures’ next to the detailed settings here and then I can navigate to my textures. I can add all of these textures at once and Rhino will give me an option of checking that the textures have been applied to the correct slot and, once I’m happy with that selection, that’s all I need to do.

Now, this material has displacement applied to it and you can see that this looks a little over the top to say the least, this is because my planar surface is small and the displacement is set by default, in this case, to 100 millimetres – so I’m just going to quickly switchback to shaded mode, pick the surface here, and change the height of the displacement to 3 millimetres.  I’ll zoom in and you can see now that this is starting to look much better,  I’ll change this again to 1mm. Whilst we’re waiting for this to build I’ll just mention that for displacement to work well you’ll need to create a dense render mesh and remember that you can set render mesh on a per object basis.

Emissive Materials are also new in version 7. These are part of the physically based description but also have a shortcut here. We will really only see the full benefit of these materials when we’re in Raytrace Mode and so now if I go to my Environment and I turn the intensity down from 1 to 0, so that I’m excluding all environmental illumination then we’ll see the effect of these emissive materials. You’ll see that I can adjust the intensity of the emission here and you’ll see that the material provides illumination and lights other objects in the scene

So, that’s about the end of what I wanted to cover in this video. Thanks for watching, and please feel free to leave any comments below. If you’ve found this video useful then please hit the ‘like’ button and, remember that to keep up with the latest developments in Rhino then you can subscribe to this channel. At Simply Rhino we offer training for Rhino and all its key plug-ins – so check out our website for more details.

Thanks again for watching and I’ll catch up with you in the next video.

The post Rhino 3D v7 – Rendering, Denoiser and Physically Based Materials appeared first on Rhino 3D.

How KeyShot helps create animation easily

Rhino, of course, has the capability to create Sun Study Animations but the benefit of using KeyShot as described is that the Sun Study can be combined with Camera movement and Object animation. KeyShot 10 makes creating this type of animation extremely straightforward and here Phil guides us through the simple steps involved.

The subject of this video is an apartment block so those using, or looking to use, Rhino3D and KeyShot in an architectural context will find this video of particular interest.

You can watch the video here and if you would like to follow along using the video transcript you’ll find this at the bottom of this page.

To learn more about KeyShot you can visit the KeyShot product page on the Simply Rhino website, you can also find out about our KeyShot training options, including a 1-day KeyShot essentials training course delivered by Phil, details of that course can be found here.

If you are interested in our previous Rhino and KeyShot video material you can find more on this site, including a video from last year in which we looked at the new features of KeyShot 9 that were of particular interest to Rhino users.

Rhino 7 and KeyShot 10 Sun Study Animation Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Phil from Simply Rhino and in this video, I’m going to take a look at creating this simple Sun Study Animation from Rhino 7 and KeyShot 10. We can, of course, create a Sun Study Animation straight from Rhino but by using KeyShot we can animate not only the Sun, but also the Camera, and Objects themselves.

The starting point for the Animation is this Rhino model of an apartment block and the surrounding context. The layers are organised on a per material basis so that we can set materials up quickly once the data is in KeyShot.

In the Rhino model, I’ve created these 9 surfaces that sit on the underside of the ceiling and these will become the internal lighting objects for the apartment block.

If I run the animation again, you’ll see that as well as the sun movement, there is a camera zoom and the lights in the apartment turn on at dusk and off just before the end of the animation. So we’ll look at creating these three elements in KeyShot.

In Rhino I’ve applied a single neutral material to all of the objects, and I’ll use the KeyShot Live Linking plug-in to push the data to KeyShot 10.

Once the model opens in KeyShot the single material is retained along with the Named Camera that I created in Rhino, and if I go to the Scene Manager the Rhino Layers are all there in the Apartment Block Model Set. So, my next task now is to apply a simple KeyShot material to each one of these layers and Save the File.

Once this is done, I’m going to go to the Lighting Tab and check that I just have the Basic Lighting Mode enabled. I’m going to change this later but, for now, the Basic Mode is going to give me fairly quick Previews of the Scene.

Next, I’m going to go to Environment Tab and then the HDRI Editor and I’m going to switch from ‘Image’ to ‘Sun and Sky’. Next, I’ll choose my location and I’ll select Madrid from the list here and set the Date to 9th August 2021.

I’ll pull back the time a little bit and, looking at the shadows, I’ll rotate the Environment to get those shadows coming over to the right like so.

Once the Environment is roughly set I can now add the animation. I can do this by Right-Clicking on ‘Environment’ here and Select ‘Add Animation’ and I’ll choose ‘Sun and Sky Day Arc’.

Doing this launches the Animation panel – with the Timeline Editor and the Properties Panel – and gives me a pre-set animation that starts at dawn and ends at dusk based on my chosen location and time of year that I set previously here. Also, in this panel I can see that the animation is set to a default of 5 seconds – that’s a little bit short for me and so I’m going to make it 15 seconds.

In the timeline editor here I’m just going to pull back on this little slider here just so I can see all 15 seconds of the animation in the Timeline without Scrolling. – SLOWLY – If I drag the ‘Playhead’ I can ‘Scrub’ through the animation just like I can in video editor.

Okay now you’ll remember that we had some lights in the animation and in order to be able to see those I really want to extend the end of animation further into the night – so I’m going to make the start time 5AM and the end time 10PM. Now, when I scrub the Playhead through the latter part of the animation I can clearly see those internal lights.

One thing to be wary of here is that when I scrub through the Timeline, make sure that if the Playhead is at the Start or the End of the Animation that I don’t accidentally drag the Work Area markers with or instead of the Playhead.

Next I’m going to add the ‘Camera Animation’. I’m going to go to my Active Camera in the Project Tab – this is the saved Camera from Rhino – and I’m going to Right Click on it and Choose ‘Add Zoom Animation’. The new animation is added to the Timeline and, once more, it will default to a length of 5 seconds from the Playhead position. I’m going to drag this out to 15 seconds or of course I can do this here by typing the value into the Properties pane.

What I want to do here is to have my existing Camera View at the end of the animation and zoom into this from a wider focal length. So, I’m going to set my ‘Start Focal Length’ to 20mm and my ‘End Focal Length’ to the current 35mm.

Now I can Preview this zoom motion – and, to make this easier to see, it may be worth going to the Window Menu and selecting the ‘Geometry View’.

Once I’m happy with the motion I can get a better idea of what’s going on by rendering out a Preview Animation. I’ll do this by clicking on the ‘Preview’ button in the Timeline Editor.

Now I can play through the animation and I can check the path of the sun and the camera movement looks okay. I may need reduce the exposure at some stage as it looks a little bright at midday – but Ican see that generally things are looking okay.

However, just at the start here I can see where the horizon of the Sun and Sky Environment is and this just needs to be lowered slightly – so I’ll look at this in a moment.

I can Save the Animation Preview if necessary but for now I won’t bother with this., but I will, however, Save the KeyShot file itself.

Next, I want to go to the start of the animation and go to the Environment Tab here and go to ‘Settings’ and just reduce the height of the Environment just slightly just to get rid of that little bit there.

Next, I want to look at the lights. If I drag the Playhead all the way to the end of the Timeline then I can see that the lights stay on constantly throughout the animation. What I want is for them to come on at Dusk and go off before the end of the animation. So, I’ll drag the Playhead to Dusk and I can clearly see that the Are Lights are on – and I’ll use this point as a position in the timeline for when I want the lights to come on.

Before I add the animation, I’m going to go to the Camera Tab and I’m going to Lock the Active Camera just so I don’t inadvertently move anything whilst I’m working.

I’m going to go to my Material Tab here and open up the Area Light material; now you’ll see that I have a fairly high value for this Area Light which means that it is visible during the day part of the animation. If I now go into the Material Graph here then what I can do is to Right Click on the Canvas, go to Animation and I can select Colour Fade.

Now, I won’t connect this Colour Fade yet, but if I double click on the Colour Fade here you’ll see the properties for this – and what I can do here is to create a simple Black and White Ramp or Gradient. In simple terms Black is ‘Off’ and white is ‘On’ and a greyscale value will dim the illumination.

So, at the start here I want to make this Black so that the Area Light is Off and then I want to add in another marker and move this fairly close to the first one and make this White.

Next, I want to add another marker here and push this close to the end and make that one White.

So, what’s going to happen here is that when we apply this colour fade the Area Light is going to turn On gradually and turn Off gradually.

So, I’ll connect the Colour Fade to the Area Light and adjust the area in the Timeline where the animation is going to take place. Now that I’ve added the animation the Area Light is Off apart from the animated area. As I move the Playhead here in the middle of this area I can see the light is On and if I move the Playhead backwards I can see the light comes on gradually.

Okay that looks good but I’ll just Render out another Preview to make sure.

That all looks good, the Horizon is now at the correct height and the Area Lights come on at the correct time – as well as playing the Preview, I can scrub along the Preview Timeline here.

Once I’m happy with the animation, I can make any necessary tweaks to the Materials, Environment, Illumination etcetera – and one important thing I want to do here is to go into the Lighting Tab and switch now to Interior Lighting mode. This will mean that my images will take longer to generate but that the quality of the illumination is going to be a lot better.

Now I can go to the ‘Render’ Menu and select ‘Render’ – and to render out the complete animation I can first of all switch to ‘Animation’ and I can set my image size here and I’ll set it to 1920×1080 pixels.
I can choose either the ‘Work Area’ or ‘Frame Range’ or the ‘Entire Duration’ of the animation and I can choose to output to a Video in a number of different formats or I can choose to output a number of Still Frames and put those together in a video editor.

As with static Rendering I can choose Layers and Passes but more important here I can go into Options and I can set my Options for Quality and then I can either press ‘Render’ or add this to a queue to render out later on.

So, thanks for watching and please leave any comments below. If you’ve found this video useful then please hit the ‘like’ button and, remember that to keep up with the latest developments in Rhino and KeyShot you can subscribe to this channel. At Simply Rhino we offer training for Rhino and all its key plug-ins – including KeyShot – so check out our website for more details.

Thanks again for watching and I’ll catch up with you in the next video.

The post Rhino 7 and KeyShot 10 Sun Study Animation Video appeared first on Rhino 3D.

This new quad mesh command (QuadRemesh) can create a quad dominant mesh from any input object – Surface, Polysurface, Sub-D or existing Mesh – and provides an extremely efficient way of reverse engineering existing data particularly given that it can convert directly to SubD.

We’ll also look further at SubD workflows, a subject we started looking at in our previous video ‘An Introduction to SubD (SubDivision Surface Modelling) in Rhino v7 WIP’. You can watch that SubD video here.

In this QuadRemesh focused video the functionality and command options of QuadRemesh are shown in detail before Phil moves on to look at a real world example of how reverse engineering complex laser scan data can be radically simplified.

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Finally, Phil takes a look at how QuadRemesh can be used to quickly determine the starting topology of a conceptual hand-wash bottle model before moving on to demonstrate more SubD modelling and workflow techniques.

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Note: In the video Phil explains the technique that was used before the QuadRemesh tool was developed and he mentions our white paper describing this. Reading this white paper helps explain how QuadRemesh has made something that was very difficult has now become quite easy. Read the white paper on working with scanned meshes here: Creating an editable surface in Rhino3d.

Credit: Shoulder Disarticulation Prosthetic in Video and Images – Izzy McInnes – www.instagram.com/izzy.makes

Rhino Training: If you’re interested in talking to us at Simply Rhino about improving your Rhino skillset or help with a particular project then get in touch. More details on our bespoke and tailored live online training can be found here on the Simply Rhino website.

An Introduction to QuadRemesh and more on SubD workflows in Rhino v7 WIP –  Video Transcript.

We’ve made a transcript of the video for anyone who would like to follow the video by script, you can read that here:

This is Phil from Simply Rhino and in this video, I’d like to introduce another new feature in the work in process (WIP) version of Rhino 7. 

(Note: we’re using a work in progress version of the software, and so some features may be further developed by the time the product ships).

Today, I’d like to take a look at QuadRemesh and how this works in conjunction with the SubD (Subdivision Surface Modelling) objects I looked at in the last video.

I’ll start by taking a look at the functionality and command options of QuadRemesh, before moving on to look at a real world example of how reverse engineering laser scan data can be radically simplified.  Finally, I’ll take a look at using QuadRemesh to help determine the starting topology of this conceptual model of a handwash dispenser, before moving on to look at some more SubD modelling workflows.

• Subject Overview

In the previous SubD video, I mentioned that in some cases, limiting SubD to a four sided topology can be useful, particularly when SubD is being used as a step in the modelling process and the ultimate aim is to output good quality NURBS surfaces, which of course have a four sided topology.  I also looked at using meshes as the starting point for SubD objects.

Now, one of the limitations of the existing mesher in Rhino, is that it outputs a mixture of triangular and quad meshes and because of this, it is not an ideal starting point for moving to SubD. Also, the way in which the original object is built determines the final mesh topology. Let’s take a look at a couple of small examples. 

Here, we have a polysurface that has five constituent surfaces.  If we look at a mesh created with the standard mesher, you’ll see an uneven topology, a mixture of quad and triangular meshes, and that the mesh is split about the surface edges. Now if we look at the same geometry, but this time measured as a revolved, trimmed surface, then the mesh created using exactly the same settings is very different. 

So, what QuadRemesh gives us is a way of creating a quad mesh with control over the topology. The face layout, number of faces and size of faces all have some level of control, making the mesh output much better for the downstream workflow.  QuadRemesh also allows us to output SubD directly. 

• So what do these new tools in Rhino 7 look like?

Let’s first take a look at some simple examples that I can use to demonstrate the various settings and controls in QuadRemesh. 

In this first example, I have a surface that, in plan, measures 100 x 100mm.  I’m going to select the surface and run QuadRemesh and first of all, we can set the mesh either by specifying a target edge length or a target quad count.  So, I’ll use edges to start off with, set the value to 10, hit preview, and then, so I can better see the mesh in preview, I’m going to hide the input object.  As expected here, I get 100 faces, and of course, because all those faces are the same size, I’m not able to resolve the curve detail in the middle of the surface. 

Now, if I switch to a quad count setting rather than an edge length setting, I’ll have more controls at my disposal and the first control I have here is adaptive size.  This basically adapts the size of the quad faces to suit the curvature of the surface.  So, it will push more of the quads into the area of curvature or detail and I’ll have larger quads in the area where there is less curvature.  So, this works on a percentage basis, 0 is no adaptation and 100 is fully adaptive.  Now, you’ll see with that value set on its highest, that I have large quads here, and more smaller quads here that are pushed into this area.  So,  now I am able to better resolve this curved form.  Now, one of the things that you may see in certain instances, is that, particularly in this instance where we have something that is linear, that maybe the shape is starting to distort slightly in the middle. 

Now, what you can also do, is you can run an option called adaptive quad count.  What this does is, it pushes more quads into the areas of curvature or detail and will increase the target quad count here.  You’ll see it does this quite substantially.  So, what I can do in this case to reduce the overall quad count, is to reduce the adaptive size, and you’ll start to see that the quad count comes down, but I still retain the structure or the topology of the mesh that I had previously.  When I want to build a mesh, I just hit okay, and now you’ll see the mesh that’s been created for my surface. 

• Mesh to SubD to NURBS in a flash!

In this second example, I have a recessed feature with a sharp edge.  So, I’m going to go ahead and run QuadRemesh and I’m going to start with the settings that I used in the last example.  So, I’ll turn on preview and hide the input objects, and you can see that we don’t have enough meshes to generate the recess shape.  So, I’m going to increase the adaptive size, and the next thing that I can do now is, if I want to capture the hard edges of this feature, I can turn on, use surface edges.  

Now the smart option will just use edges that contribute to a shape change, and the strict option will use all the edges in the surface.  In this example, I’ll get the same result with both, but generally, you’d want to be using the smart option here.

You’ll see now, how I’m starting to pick out these issues.  So, what I really need to do now is sort out the topology of the mesh.  So, maybe just as a starting point, I would reduce the adaptation and just increase the number of quads.  Now, we’re seeing the shape a little better. 

Another thing that we can do is that we can instantly convert to SubD and if we want to maintain the sharp edges on the Sub D, I need to make sure that the SubD is crease aware and I also need to use this setting here, detect hard edges.  

The original surface of course is symmetrical in both X and Y, and I can create a symmetry axis here and this is about the X and Y of the object itself, and you can see when I do this, that our patch layout is now symmetrical, but also, what you can see is that because I’m using the surface edge option here, is how the topology of the mesh is running around that edge.  

I’m just going to increase the quad count here slightly and then let’s export this out.  

If we have a look at these two.  Looking pretty similar.  You’ll notice that in this original here, I have a hard edge around the mitres.  Now, I can get that back here in my Sub D, just by using sub-object selection, picking these edges here and then adding a crease to those.

So, now you can see I have a SubD with control topology that closely resembles my target polysurface. 

• Getting deeper into the new Mesher for Rhino

In this example, I have a cylindrical feature that’s raised out of a plain surface.  Now, if I run QuadRemesh and I preview the result and just for the moment hide the input object, then you’ll see that using similar settings to what we ended up with in the previous example, I can get a good result.  You’ll see that the topology here transitions from being circular to being much more rectangular as it gets out towards the edge of my planar surface.

If I wanted the circular topology to persist slightly further, so I could for example put a circular feature into the resulting SubD, then what I can do is I can use guide curves.  So, I’ll turn on a layer here that has a curve on this and I’ll select that curve and enter to accept the result and I have some options with the curve influence here.  I can have that, having no influence.  I can use an approximate influence, or I can create either an edge ring or an edge loop.  Now the edge loop would be the obvious answer in this situation, and now you can see that I’ve got an edge loop that is near to my guide curve and now all of the topology inside of that is circular. 

Now let’s build the SubD and take a look at putting in that round recess.  So, I’ll just move the SubD surface out of the way and here I want to pick a face loop and I’m going to use the gumball to push that down.  Couple of quick things that I’ll mention that perhaps I should have mentioned in the last video, that it’s a good idea to have a lighter object set and it’s also a good idea to use smooth dragging so that you don’t inadvertently snap to any other objects.  Smooth dragging will give you much more control over moving faces and edges with the gumball. 

I’m just going to pull down now here, just to create this and let’s put another one here.  So, let’s pick another face loop, and pull that down and push that one upwards maybe. 

So, now you can see that because we’ve been able to control the topology of the mesh or the SubD, we can now create a SubD object that we can modify in a particular way.  

• Rhino 7 QuadRemesh and SubD for Reverse Engineering a Scanned Mesh

Now, let’s look at a real world application for QuadRemesh and SubD.  This is a good example of how the modelling process can be radically simplified by using these new tools.  This is a Rhino model of a shoulder disarticulation prosthesis created by Izzy McInnes.  Izzy works as a special effects designer in film and TV, but also designs these fully functional prosthetics.  I first saw Izzy’s work when she attended one of the Simply Rhino intermediate advanced training classes in London.

Now, at the time of making this video, we’re in the middle of the global pandemic and all our training has been moved online.  You can see details of all of our online training at simplyrhino.co.uk or, of course, you can call us for more details.   

These prosthetics are for people, mainly young adults, who would like to express their individuality and personality via their prosthetics, rather than use a more modest, standard medical device.  The result is both attractive and functional with a tattoo-like decoration on switchable covers and practical features such as the concealed storage compartment and a mobile phone charger.  

• It’s a real effort to go from complex 3D Scan to Rhino 3D surface right?  Not any longer.

The starting point for a project like this would be a laser scan of in this case, the wearer’s left arm. 

Having created and mirrored the scan, the next step would be to create editable surfaces from the mesh that could then be split, offset into solid parts and then detailed.  With a traditional approach, this scanned mesh to NURBS conversion would be a time consuming bottle neck.  If we look at the scan, it’s incredibly complex and there’s almost 100,000 faces in this example.  One existing workflow would be to create multiple regular section curves through the scan, in the desired U and V directions.  These would then be rebuilt as smooth degree 3 curves with a known number of control points, before building a number of separate surfaces. 

You can see a white paper describing this process on our website, and I’ll leave a link to this in the description below.

This traditional process would be incredibly time consuming, but thankfully, this is now virtually a simple push button conversion.  We can use QuadRemesh to take our scan and convert that directly to a SubD surface.  So, I’ll pick the mesh and open up QuadRemesh and I’ll start with 2000 quads, 80% adaptive size and an adaptive quad count.  I’ll have ‘detect hard edges’ on, convert to SubD, and crease SubD so I can maintain the crease at the top of the shoulder here.  I’ll turn on the preview and hide the input objects and what we’ll see when the mesh is generated is that first of all we get a closed SubD, which is composed entirely of quads.  If we look at the detail areas around the ends of the fingers and between the fingers, these are all closed off.  But perhaps the most important thing is that the topology of the NURBS patches, or indeed the mesh faces if you were just wanting the mesh output, is derived from the principle curvature of the object we are remeshing, and what that means is that our layout of our patches, of our SubD faces are almost ideally where we would want them to create either a good SubD or a good downstream conversion to NURBS.  

You can see here that we’ve reduced the number of faces to under 4000 from our 100,000 original faces, and although there are some detail areas around here where we might need to get closer to the mesh, this is a fairly good start.

Now, in reality, probably what we would want to do is create a separate QuadRemesh for the forearm, where we’d want the quad layout on that to be fairly open and then a separate quad mesh for the hand and finger details, where we’ve got a much higher level of detail that we need to resolve and because the parts are going to be split out, there is no problem in creating those separate meshes. 

However, before we do that, I’m just going to accept the SubD conversion and move this out the way, and then just compare these two objects with each other.  So, what you can see is that we get a really good clean, smooth conversion of our scan and immediately, we have a surface that we can actually work with.  So, the importance of this is that we can do something perhaps in one or two minutes that might have taken half a day previously.

• Strategies

Now let’s take a look at a couple of strategies for the forearm part. 

First, we could take a copy of the scan and trim out the section we needed.  Next we can use QuadRemesh to produce a SubD surface with a limited number of faces.  As the scan mesh is now open, I’m going to use the interpolate option to get the SubD closer to the target mesh.  This is the time saving part where we can go very quickly from a complex mesh, to a simple editable SubD surface. 

Next, we have a choice as to whether to continue working in SubD or convert the SubD to NURBS.  For offsetting as a solid, and splitting it to panels or parts, we could use either, but if we wanted to apply the tattoo style decoration with either flow along surface or orient on surface, then NURBS may be the best option, but the simplest solution might not be the most obvious. 

Let’s first of all convert the SubD surface to NURBS.  This gives a polysurface with a surface patch for every SubD face.  If the aim was to use ‘flow along surface’ or ‘orient on surface’ to apply the decoration then we’d really need a surface rather than a polysurface.  Both of these commands will only work with a single surface at the time.  So, for example, if I go to transform and ‘orient on surface’, and I attempt to orient the decoration on to the polysurface, then it will only let me orient on to one constituent surface of that polysurface.  Likewise, if I work directly with the SubD, then I’ll be limited to one of the patches of the SubD that I can orient to.  

So, let’s take a look at a couple of ways by which we can create single surfaces.  Now, the first method is slightly risky and I wouldn’t suggest this method for any objects that have much in the way of local shape change. 

I am going to take the polysurface that was created from the NURBS conversion and I’m going to explode that into its constituent surfaces.  Then I’m going to go to surface and surface edit tools and use the merge command.  It’s important when you use this command in instances like this that the smooth option here is turned off.  What we do is we take a pair of surfaces at a time and merge them together. 

Now, as I’ve tried to explain in the introduction, if there is not much in the way of local shape change going on, then we should be able to merge surfaces together into a larger, single surface.  The second method is somewhat simpler and we’re going to work directly with the SubD surface.  Now, when we created the SubD from the mesh, effectively we reverse engineered the Sub D from the mesh, and we’re now going to reverse engineer a NURBS surface from the SubD, and the way that we’re going to do this is to extract the wire frame from this SubD.  So, we’re going to go to curve, curve from objects and extract wireframe.  Pick the SubD object and enter.  Then we can take that wireframe and because it has a very simple structure, we can use a surface command to build a surface directly from that wireframe.  So, I’ll use surface, curve network, select the result here.  I’ll probably use a fairly loose tolerance on the edge curves, maybe 0.1 of a millimetre and an even looser tolerance on the interior curves, in an effort to get a very simple surface.  Then I’ll accept the result and there is my single surface.  

• 3 x Steps from Mesh to Surface, nothing Magic about it.

Now we can go from mesh, single editable Sub D surface, to single editable NURBS surface, in three very quick steps.  

So, now I’ve split out the forearm panel by using split at isocurve with the shrink option turned on and now I’m just going to take a quick look at flowing this pattern on to the forearm panel.  So, I’ll go to transform, flow along surface, pick the pattern and enter.  Then I’ll use the plain option and describe the rectangular plain and click on the target surface.  The idea with the plain option is that the rectangular boundary here, represents the boundary of the surface.  So, it gives me some control over where the pattern will sit on the surface.  

Now let’s take a look at the result and you can see both the surface of the panel and the pattern look acceptable. 

Let’s now take a quick look at how to create a solid offset panel using SubD.  So, the first step would be to remove the appropriate faces.  So, I’m going to use the face loop tool here and select the faces I want to remove and then delete them.  Now, note at this stage that the corners will become smooth.  This isn’t what I want to achieve but this is fairly easy to sort out once we’ve configured the panel. 

So, next I’ll use the offset SubD command to create a solid offset and I’ll flip the direction, because I want to offset inwards and I’ll set the distance to 4mm and again, you’ll see that the edges are smooth, which isn’t what I want in this instance.  So, I’ll switch to the flat display mode. Now, there is now an icon for this tool, which toggles between flat and smooth display mode, but you can also use the tab key to toggle between those modes.  Now that I’m in the flat mode, I’m going to select the edges.  So, I’m using sub-object selection here, holding down shift and control.  Once I’ve got all those edges selected, I can add a crease to them, then I can return to the smooth mode and we’ll see the final result. 

Now of course, you could start the whole process in flat mode if you found that easier.

• Rhino v7 (WIP) QuadRemesh and SubD for quick conceptual modelling – structural packaging example

For the last example in this video, I’d like to look at some more SubD workflow. 

This hand wash dispenser bottle, lends itself well to be modelled in SubD.  An example of where you might use this process is in creating a number of conceptual iterations of the bottle that all use the same pump dispenser.  So, there would be a need to generate the concepts quickly, but they would also need to be modelled reasonably well so that good quality renderings can be produced from the Rhino data.  

• Improving the workflow for Packaging Designers

So, the starting point for this model would be this open polysurface with these curves projected on to the front curved surface.  So, I’ll pick the poly surface.  I’ll run QuadRemesh and I’ll turn on the preview and hide the input objects.  I’ll make sure that my output is SubD and I’ll select the curves that I want to influence the topology.  I’ll choose edge loop.  Finally I’ll set Y axis symmetry and to improve the edges, I’ll select smart edge.  Then I’ll accept the result.  Whilst the SubD is highlighted, I’ll move that to a new layer and I’ll copy that on to a third layer.  This means that I have a copy of the original SubD and then a second copy that I can now edit.  Next, I just want to remove this edge on both sides, so that my topology is similar top to bottom.  So, I’ll tap to show the flat display mode and I’ll select this edge and this edge and delete them. Then I’ll tab to go back into smooth mode.  

Now, my topology is similar top to bottom at the centre. 

Next, I want to create the raised area for the label.  So, I’ll first of all make sure that my face selection is selected and first of all, I’ll choose a face loop and I’ll select this area and then I want to use a brush tool to select inside that area.

Once I have this area selected, I can save that selection.  This is a new feature in Version 7, and I can go to panels and named selections and I can save this selection as label area.  So, this is a really handy way of being able to save any sort of selection in Rhino.  With that area selected, I’m just going to push this out very slightly.  So, I’m going to turn on the gumball, make sure the gumball is aligned to object with smooth dragging, and just pull this out slightly.

Next up, I’m going to harden the edge of that area by putting in a crease, so, I’ll disable the selection, I’ll use shift and control and double click to pick the boundary of that region and I’ll add the crease. 

• Rendering tools are there for all users of Rhino, not matching V-Ray for Rhino or KeyShot but likely good enough for some.

In order to see features like this better, I created a custom display mode called surface evaluation.  It’s very easy to create custom display modes in Rhino 7 or indeed Rhino 6.  It’s just a case of going to the Rhino options, going to view and display modes, and in this case, I took the shaded mode and made a copy of it.  Once you do that, you will see all of the features for the display mode in question and all that I did in this instance was to create a custom material for all of the objects that just had a highly reflective environment and that environment just had the blurry spherical image applied to it.

Before I move on and do more sculpting of the shape, I’m going to look at another feature in Sub D, and that is called reflect, and that allows me to create a symmetry across a centre line of the object.  So, what I’m going to do is pick my face selection and I’m going to select all of the faces on the one side of the object and delete them.  I’m then going to run the reflect tool and I’m going to pick the Sub D that I want to apply a reflection to.  I’m going to choose the C plain Y axis, and I’m going to pick a point on the geometry to keep.  The idea of this is that any geometry between the point that I’m picking on now and the Y axis, can change in order to create the symmetry and anything in this case to the left of that is going to be maintained.  So, I’ll pick that point and then I’ll enter to accept the result. 

Now of course, because my geometry was already mirrored, the result is exactly the same here.  But the idea now is that if I pick a face here, and I then turn on my gumball and edit that face, then the symmetrical face will update as well.  So, this makes editing a symmetrical object an awful lot easier.  So, now I can start to sculpt the SubD by moving faces, edges and point and gradually resolve the shape. 

Personally, I find it useful to use the flat display from time to time to help me for example line up rows of points along an edge.  As usual, I would save the geometry on to layers as I go, in case I need to return to a previous step.  Once I’m happy with the shape, I’ll use reflect again, to create the rear of the form.  The result is now a closed SubD.  for my visual, I’ll need to create a thickness to the bottle, whilst maintaining a solid volume and I’ll need a separate solid volume for the liquid.  I’ll need solid so that the retrace renderer can calculate the correct refractions. 

Let’s first take a look at the bottle and I’m going to start by removing these two faces here and remember that I have reflect on, so the faces at the back will also be removed, and I’m now going to use the offset command, to offset this volume, inwards.  First of all, I’ll switch to the flat display mode and I’ll then run the offset SubD command.  I’ll make sure that I’m offsetting inwards, and I’ll set the distance to 1.2mm.  

Once the offset has been created, I can pick the top edge and the bottom edge of the opening and I can add a crease to them.  I can then return to smooth mode.  To create the liquid, I’ll start with another copy of the closed SubD volume, and I’ll use the offset SubD command, and this time, I’ll offset inwards by a distance of 0.6mm with the solid option turned off.  You’ll notice that when I do this, I lose the crease on the label area, and because of the way in which the object is built, i.e. it’s a blow moulding that is only controlled by its outside or A surface, then the idea that we smooth off this feature on the inside, actually creates a lifelike offset.  

If we wanted to put the crease back in, of course we can select the edge loop and add the crease to it. 

To move on now and to create the top of the liquid, I’ll probably be better off converting the object to NURBS.  So, I’ll copy this on to a new layer and I’ll convert the geometry to NURBS.  Then I can create the top of the liquid by creating a line and using a solid tool such as wire cut to cut through the top of my volume.  

If I want to create the curve meniscus on the edge of the liquid, then I can remove the flat plain which was created by wire cut and I can draw a curve and then I can orient this to the edge of the opening.  So, I’ll use transform, orient, perpendicular to curve, and then I’ll pick this edge here.  You’ll see that orients and I’ll flip this in Y, to get this the right way around and place this here.  Okay, then I can use sweep 1 rail, with the chain edges option turned on and autochain selected, pick the edge as the rail and then pick the cross section curve and enter.  Just accept the default free form and do not change cross sections for this.  Join the sweep on to the polysurface and finally I can cap the remaining plainer hole and just check that this is a closed solid polysurface. 

To add the neck and finish to the bottle, I will need to convert to NURBS as SubD being equivalent to degree 3 NURBS, won’t create the correct circular section I need.  Whilst I was editing the SubD, I removed some edges, and you’ll see that I have a six sided face here, and a five sided face here.  When I convert to NURBS, there’ll be some extra patches added here that I’m not in control of and it’s probably a good idea to avoid these five and six sided faces where possible.  The rest of the model can now be completed in NURBS.  I created the transitional neck and finish with screw thread as a solid polysurface and then I joined this to the solid bottle.

Although there are two solid components, it is much easier to separate out the inner and outer surfaces of both and then trim, join and fill it, the outer surface, and repeat for the inner before joining everything back into a solid.

So, that’s about it for this video.  Please feel free to leave any comments below and if you have found this video useful, please hit the like button.  To keep up with all the latest Rhino news and developments, please subscribe to this video and do also remember to check out our website for details of our online rhino training.  Thanks for watching.

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In this video Phil Cook from Simply Rhino takes a look at KeyShot 9. KeyShot is an easy to use, photorealistic renderer that’s easy to use without a steep learning curve.

This new version of KeyShot, version 9, features a number of enhancements and new features.

For the purposes of this video Phil has chosen five of these new KeyShot features that may be of most interest to Rhino users, these are:

• Fuzz (Pro version only)
• Denoise
• GPU Rendering
• Real Cloth (Pro version only)
• Model Library

As well as introducing the new features there is a short tutorial on modelling a tennis ball in Rhino3d and rendering this in KeyShot using the new Fuzz material. There is also a breakdown of the hardware requirements for GPU rendering.

Please note that this video is made with pre-release versions of KeyShot 9 and that some features may be improved on the shipping product.

Video Chapters:

• 00.00 – 00.35 Introduction
• 00.35 – 05.52 Fuzz
• 05.52 – 12.45 Fuzz – Rhino Tennis Ball Model – Quick Tutorial
• 12.45 – 19.12 Denoise
• 19.12 – 29.40 GPU Rendering
• 29.40 – 37.05 Real Cloth
• 37.05 – 39.34 Model Library

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In this video Phil Cook from Simply Rhino takes a look at the latest version of KeyShot, KeyShot 8, and highlights some of the new features that will appeal to Rhino users.

Luxion continue to provide enhancements and new features based on user feedback and KeyShot 8 features Displacement, Cutaways and a new Liquid type material that no longer requires special geometry – all three of which have been much requested.

Included in this video:

•  00.00 Overview
• 02.15 Liquids
• 03.50 Bubbles
• 06.10 Displacement
• 10.30 Spotlight
• 15.40 Fog
• 19.00 Scattering Materials
• 22.20 Cutaways

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Rhino and KeyShot

If you are a designer working with Rhino there’s a good chance that you are, or would like to be, involved in creating visuals or renderings from your models; and if you’re familiar with rendering, then you’ve probably heard of KeyShot.

Product Design Rendering with KeyShot

KeyShot generates high quality photorealistic visuals quickly and with minimal learning overhead. The simple interface and pre-built lighting environments mean that you can set up a render in minutes. Drag and drop physically accurate materials, lighting environments and backplates combined with simple sliders for lighting, quality and camera position ensure that you can concentrate on creating great visuals rather than wresting with the interface and making endless adjustments. KeyShot is used by some of the world’s leading companies including Motorola, Chrysler, Philips, Microsoft and Whirlpool.

KeyShot Adds The Sparkle To Your Jewellery Design

In KeyShot you can renders rings modelled in Rhino that range from beautiful single settings to elegant cluster rings with multiple materials and gems which are perfected by adjusting the materials, lighting, ground reflection and camera technique to suit your requirements.

KeyShot has its roots in automotive and product design and these types of studio set-ups remain its strong suit. Over the years, however, KeyShot has added features such as light objects, a ‘sun and sky’ environment and an interior lighting mode that broaden the range of the product – so if, for example, you are involved in occasional architectural scenes then KeyShot has a solution for this.

Easy to Learn Photorealistic Rendering

Luxion, the developers of KeyShot, have been working on this rendering platform for over ten years and, over the various releases, KeyShot has now become an extremely full featured product with a feature set to rival most renderers on the market. What this means in practice is that it’s easy to jump straight into KeyShot and produce great photorealistic visuals, but there is a real depth to the product that allows you to add complexity to materials and effects to the lighting and camera when needed. KeyShot also allows you to save out separate layers and render passes for post processing composition in Photoshop.

Click our videos below to learn more

Getting Rhino data into KeyShot is easy. Although KeyShot is a standalone product that reads a wide variety of CAD formats, there is a ‘live linking’ plug-in for Rhino. This plug-in means that not only can you launch a KeyShot render from inside Rhino but that when you change your geometry in Rhino you can also easily pass these changes on to KeyShot without having to re-apply materials.

No doubt you’ve already seen some of the high quality photorealistic results that KeyShot can produce; so now take a look at our KeyShot video series to see just how easy it is to work with Rhino and KeyShot. If your mind is made up that KeyShot is the right render package for you then you can buy it now – just click the button below to visit the Rhino Webstore and make your KeyShot purchase.

Buy KeyShot Now

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Product Design Rendering using Rhino for Mac and KeyShot for Mac – Textures, Mapping and Labels

In this video, Phil Cook of Simply Rhino takes a look at creating photorealistic images of a Home Assistant.

The device is modelled in Rhino for Mac with minimal detail and then rendered in KeyShot for Mac where detail such as a perforated grille and local raised and recessed moulded areas is added. Using a straightforward lighting and environment setup, Phil looks first at creating mesh materials for the loudspeaker grille. Two methods are detailed, using and adjusting the built in mesh material and creating a new material from scratch using a colour map, bump map and opacity map. As well as creating the materials, the subject of controlling the mapping and scaling the textures in KeyShot is examined. Finally the subject of creating local textures for text, button icons etc is demonstrated using KeyShot’s Labels feature, and this is also used to create local bump maps and opacity maps in order to create moulded detail that is not present on the Rhino model.

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In this video Phil Cook of Simply Rhino looks at transportation rendering in Rhino for Mac and KeyShot for Mac.

Using the example of a High Speed Train, Phil shows how photorealistic images can be created quickly and easily in KeyShot. This is a basic or introductory level tutorial.

Unlike a car, for example, the train is fairly slab-sided and does not have as many varying reflective surfaces to catch the light and describe the form and so careful consideration is needed when creating the illumination. A couple of illumination methods are examined along with using Light Objects in KeyShot. The video also describes making changes to library materials and storing these revised materials in a user generated folder. The rendered images are tweaked in Adobe Photoshop and Phil also describes this process including creating a composite image with an alpha channel and a simple layer mask technique giving the impression of motion.

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