Rendering
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.
The two options
Raytracing — Render Studio
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
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 and no render queue.
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 |
They are not alternatives you have to choose between once. Most people use Realtime while the design moves and Render Studio when it stops.
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.
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.
The rest of the section
- Commands — the Rhino rendering commands RhinoArtisan surfaces in its ribbon: lights, materials, texture mapping, environments and the display advanced options. They feed both engines.