Rhino Tutorial: Customizing Perspective View Settings and Making Simple Renderings

Hello everyone, this tutorial will be going over the basics in customizing the view of your rhino document while working in perspective, as well as creating a simple render with the raytraced view in Rhino. This tutorial will be useful for those who do not like any of the Rhino default viewing settings while working in 3D.

Lets start by opening up a Rhino document with simple 3D objects, and double clicking the perspective view to make it full screen. Then set the view to “shaded”

Type in the command “Document properties” and open up the shaded properties by selecting view>display modes> shaded.

To create a view that looks similar to sketchup, first uncheck “show isocurves,” and then change the back ground to “Solid color” and select white.

After change the edge thickness to 1, and the ambient color to a color just below mid gray. I personally find this view easier to work in when building 3D models.

We can add shadows next by selecting “shadows” under the shaded tab and turning it on. You can play with the settings by moving the sliders until reaching the desired effect.

Now lets move on to creating a simple rendering using Rhino.

First change the view to “Raytraced” under the perspective tab. There will be a counter in the bottom left corner, and you will notice that as the counter goes up, the view on your screen will become sharper. If you are using rhino 6 the image will finish rendering when that counter reaches 1000.

Every time you move the screen you will notice that the counter will reset and the view will become grainy again.

In order to change the sun direction, select panels>sun in the top menu. You will then see a new tab with a few dials. You can manually change the sun direction and height using those dials. You can also get a accurate shadows by using the location tab, where you can select any site and Rhino will automatically produce the sun settings for that specific location.

Lastly, the easiest way to save your render to a file, is to use the command “ViewCaptureToFile” This will create a image file with your selected view.

You can also use the print command, however, you will have to wait for rhino to complete the render again.

I hope the tutorial was useful! Thanks for Reading!