Commands

Two of these commands are RhinoArtisan’s own — they solve the two things you always have to do before rendering a piece of jewellery. The rest are Rhino’s rendering commands, gathered into the ribbon so you do not have to hunt for them: panels, lights, texture mapping, colour synchronization and the advanced display effects.

They are shared ground: whatever you set here — materials, lights, environment, mapping — is used by Render Studio and by Realtime Render alike.

Positioning the piece

Lying on the ground

Drops the piece into a natural resting position, calculating the inclination that balances it on the ground. A ring standing perfectly upright always reads as fake, no matter how good the render is.

Pair

Builds a pair from a single model — earrings, matching bands — with control over mirroring, distance and the angle between them.

Panels

The panels where the scene is actually set up.

• Materials — colour, finish, transparency, texture and bump for every material in the model.
• Environment — background colour, image and projection, the light the piece reflects.
• Lights — every light in the scene in one list, with its own toolbar to add and edit them.
• Textures — the textures used by materials and environments.
• Ground — an infinite ground plane at a chosen elevation, far faster to render than a surface.
• Library — materials, textures and environments saved to disk, shared between models.

Lights

Creating and aiming the lights themselves.

• Point Light — light from a single point in every direction.
• Directional Light — parallel rays from one direction, like the sun.
• Linear Light — a tube of light, for long soft highlights along a band.
• Rectangular int Light — a rectangular area light, the softbox of the studio.
• Light Properties — intensity, colour, shadows and the rest of a light’s settings.
• Edit Light by Highlight Location — move the light by pointing at where you want the highlight to land.
• Edit Light by Looking — aim the light from the light’s own point of view.
• Set Spotlight to View — put the spotlight where the camera is.
• Set View to Spotlight — put the camera where the spotlight is.

Textures

Texture mapping: how an image lands on a surface.

• Planar Mapping, Box Mapping, Spherical Mapping, Cylindrical Mapping — the projection primitives.
• UV Mapping — map along the surface’s own parameters.
• Unwrap Texture — flatten the object so a texture can be painted onto it.
• Show Mapping / Hide Mapping — display the mapping widget so you can see what you are adjusting.
• Edit Object Texture Mapping Coordinates — edit the mapping coordinates directly.
• Apply Custom Texture Mapping / Extract Custom Mapping — custom mapping objects, applied and recovered.
• Match Texture Mapping — copy one object’s mapping onto others.
• Remove Mapping Channel — delete a mapping channel from an object.
• Pack Textures / Unpack Textures — store texture files inside the 3dm, or extract them back out.
• Refresh All Textures — reload the image files from disk.

Sync

Keeping display colours and render materials telling the same story.

• Set Render Color — assign a render colour to the selected objects.
• Synchronize Render Color — make each object’s material colour match its display colour, creating the material if there is none.
• Set Material Source Layer — take the material from the object’s layer instead of the object.
• Match Identical Material — align objects onto the same material.
• Merge Identical — find materials with identical settings, keep one and delete the rest, reassigning as it goes.

Advanced

Effects the display pipeline adds at render time, without changing the geometry.

• Curve Piping — render a curve as a solid pipe: wires, threads, milgrain paths.
• Displacement — push the surface in and out from a texture, for real relief instead of a bump.
• Softening — round off sharp edges at render time.
• Shutlining — cut a groove along a curve on the surface.
• Thickness — give an open surface a rendered wall thickness.