Realtime Render

Realtime Render opens your design in an interactive 3D viewer, immediately. There is no render queue and no waiting for passes: the scene is exported to a lightweight 3D model and displayed in a hardware-accelerated WebGL viewer that you can spin, zoom and orbit as fast as you can move the mouse.

It is not trying to compete with Render Studio on image quality. It is solving a different problem: seeing the piece now, and letting somebody else see it too.

Run it with ArtisanRealtimeRender, or from the Realtime Render button in the ribbon — it is in both the File and the Rendering tabs.

What you get

• A separate always-on-top window with the piece loaded, ready to be turned around.
• Full mouse interaction: orbit, pan and zoom.
• Live Update — a checkbox that keeps the viewer in sync with the Rhino document. Leave it on and the viewer follows your edits as you make them; leave it off and the model stays as it was when you opened it.
• Refresh — pushes the current state of the document to the viewer once, on demand.

Opening the window always refreshes the model from the document you are actually working on, so you never present a client a piece from the previous file.

When to use it

• In front of a customer. Handing someone a ring they can turn around themselves is a different conversation from showing them a picture of it.
• During design reviews. Checking proportions, how the shank meets the head, or whether a stone reads at the size you intended, all without stopping to render.
• As a sanity check. A quick look from every angle catches things that hide in an orthographic viewport.

Notes

• The viewer runs on WebView2, the Microsoft Edge component that ships with Windows, served from a small local server on your own machine. Nothing leaves your computer and no internet connection is needed.
• The exported model is cached. If the document has not changed since the last export, reopening the window loads instantly instead of exporting again.
• If you never open Realtime Render, none of this runs — there is no background export and no cost to having the feature there.
• Because it is a realtime viewer, materials are an approximation. Gems and polished metals in particular look considerably better in Render Studio — use that for anything a client will keep.