Christmas CAD

I've been muddling through Rhino 5.0 and Flamingo nXt attempting to make my lovely jewelry objects look pretty and becoming fustrated that the version is just different enough that it feels like I'm relearning everything, and everything I do make doesn't look as good as it should. But, let's begin with what I have worked out, with the example of my arrow rings. The above image is rendered with Rhino's built in renderer as compared to...

How Flamingo does it. I assure you nothing has changed between these two images other than the renderer. Flamingo images will always have more light in them by default.

 

 

The other new(ish) thing with Flamingo nXt is that it will keep making passes over the rendered image, attempting to smooth out the shadows each time until you tell it to stop or set a limit. Here I let the program do three passes. Notice how blurry the shadow are on the yellow ring in front especially set against the single pass image below it.

Another advantage of sorts with nXt is that they dumped in a ton of background options, or at least made them much easier to access. No longer is it necessary to create an infinity cyc by manually putting a curved surface behind your object you can instead set the background to be a two or three color gradient or an image. I tested it out going from black to white in the background of this earring and human shaped display prop I made.

Lights and reflectivity are still a huge problem and perhaps are even worse in this program. No matter what I do the lights are still too bright in Flamingo and over expose the hell out of it. This was perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing mistake because it sort of looks like the old PS3 game Mirror's Edge, which I never have played.

While I work out how to light and render shiny objects I'm building a few more complex ones now that im a little more into the Rhino groove. At this point I swear "sweep rail" must be my favorite command to do.


Well it's back to the virtual drawing board to see what else I can work out by my deadline! Ciao!