Rendering

Showing a piece is not one job, it is two. Sometimes you need an image good enough to sit on a website or a client’s screen next to a photograph. And sometimes you just need to turn the ring around in front of someone, right now, without waiting.

RhinoArtisan gives you two rendering engines, one for each of those jobs — plus a live-linked bridge to KeyShot if that is where you render:

• Raytracing — Render StudioPhotorealistic images and turntable videos on Cycles: real reflections, refraction and dispersion — the images you deliver.
• Realtime RenderAn instant WebGL viewer: spin, zoom and show the piece with no render queue — designing, reviewing, selling.
• KeyShotLive Linking keeps the KeyShot scene tied to the Rhino document — change the design, click Update, the render follows.
• CommandsThe ribbon's rendering toolbox — lights, materials, texture mapping, sync and display options. It feeds both engines.

The two engines

Render Studio is the photorealistic route, built on Cycles, the same physically based raytracer that ships inside Rhino. Light is actually traced through the scene: metals reflect their surroundings, stones refract and disperse, and shadows fall where physics says they should. You use it for the images you deliver — catalogue shots, e-commerce photography, social posts, turntable videos — and you pay for the quality in render time, measured in passes.

Realtime Render is the instant route. The scene is exported to a lightweight 3D model and opened in a WebGL viewer that responds immediately: spin it, zoom it, look at it from any angle with no waiting. You use it while you are still designing, and above all in front of a customer — it is the difference between describing a piece and handing it to someone.

Which one do I want?

	Render Studio (Cycles)	Realtime Render
Quality	Photorealistic	Approximate, good enough to read the shape
Speed	Seconds to minutes, by quality	Instant
Output	Image files, turntable video	An interactive viewer
Best for	Catalogue, web, social, presentations	Design reviews, showing a client, quick checks
Interaction	You set a camera and render it	You spin the piece yourself
Hardware	A performance graphics card — Cycles renders on the GPU, and render times depend directly on it	Runs on any machine

Already rendering in KeyShot?

If KeyShot is your rendering tool, you lose nothing by designing in RhinoArtisan — the two work better together than either does alone. The integration is deep, not a plain export: Live Linking keeps the KeyShot scene tied to the Rhino document, so a change to the design updates the render with a single Update click — no re-importing, no reassigning materials, no losing the lighting and camera you set up. And a Render button inside RhinoArtisan sends the piece straight to KeyShot.

In practice that means you keep the modelling speed of RhinoArtisan and the render quality of KeyShot in the same loop: iterate on the design, refresh the render, iterate again.