Rhino vs. Max

[jujubee]

Pardon my newbish question as I don't use any other 3D programs. But I've been noticing more and more people modelling objects in Rhino recently and rendering with Vray. Does anyone have any particular reason to use Rhino instead of Max or is it mainly a matter of preferences? What are the real advantages? And if it is a better overall program, what's the self-taught time-wise learning curve from Max?

-juju

[losbellos]

rhino is nurbs modeler, the best of it, the only reason is that, I guess.

[natty]

download it ..... its so easy to use once you get the hang of it. most of the comands derive from autocad, so it very easy to produce very highly modelled models. eg. product design ect etc... try it ...

[freak]

i use rhino personally, in rhino, modelling is much more convenient, sometimes shapes that take very long time in max(spline modelling) to make is very easy for rhino...................the second best thing about rhino(nurbs) is that every mesh is goin to be super smooth(which probly equal to 10 iteration meshsmooth mod. ) ...that's why suurland's car appear to be so real..................


ps: smooth is not the word i am lookin for, but i cant find any other word better than it.....what i am tryin to say is that if one apply meshsmooth, the shape generally will deform, but if one done the mesh in rhino, the shape wont be deformed, but still very smooth...........

[jujubee]

Thanks alot for all of your info. It's helpful to know that. So do you guys model in Rhino than import most of your models into Max as a prefered method?

[fredc]

Rhino starts as an autocad plugin, that's why it's was not much learn
for people who know autocad. But u can miss usefull workflow from max ( pile editor- parametric object ).
what u gain from max : accuracy ! real snap and the ability to pan/zoom
change view inside a command (max coodinate system is a pity).
also features of a modern CAD/CAM system (ability to analyse object for production)
to import object : i/o plugin u get nurbs surface
or export 3ds meshes from rhino.


fred

[Geddart]

Rhino is a very powerful Nurbs Modeller and we use it for many of our projects. You can use it perfectly together with max too. (now)

In the past you had to tesselate the mesh very dense and you had a mess in your viewport. We just loaded the PowerSolids2 Demo and it turns out to be the best way to connect the two Proggies.
Version 2 is really fast and easy to use. it's real Nurbs in Max (Max's attempt don't deservea the name Nurbs) although you can't modell really but that's the Job of Rhino anyway.
You just get them perfectly in max for rendering with Vray. Slick in Render, fast in the Viewport.

So, go try it out, if you have the right Objects to modell in Rhino this could be become a good Pipeline.

regards
Geddart

[freak]

Geddart i wanna ask u something , how do u use powersolid: automatically mesh the objects everytime u render / u mesh them manually so it wont mesh them everytime u click render (it' s a pain in the butt b/c sometimes u need to do a lot of test renders...)..........???

[Geddart]

When i import a Rhino object i often switch to scanline wireframe renderer and make the Tesselation perfect so that i don't have to tweak that when i'm on materials l8er. The "production" setting gives you almost a perfect mesh, just crank up the spinners even a bit more (especially when you do reflections/refractions) When i'm done with the Tesselation i simply click "Save rendermesh" so that it stores a meshed version of the modell that's used for rendering. That's all - i don't have to think about tesselation anymore. I can switch my viewport mesh to a lower setting and start to work with vray. I tried Version1 once and it really was a pain. I have the feeling that Version2 is much faster actually.

I will post some pictures done with powersolids2 soon.

[freak]

thx ....

[flipside]

Yes rhino is really great for accurate modeling. Powertranslator is indeed the best way to bring your rhino files into max, and it has very good options for meshing the model. it can save you a lot of time, because without it you need to mesh every part seperately in rhino to bring it into max in a decent way.

Geddart, do you use the 'pixel' option (don't remember name exactly, only used demo) in meshing options? Because that way it meshes more dense in closer areas and less dense in areas further away (or areas smaller in the render). But this is not always good for example if you mesh this way, save the mesh and then render another view.

[Gijs]

And they recently released a stripped version of Powertranslator which only imports rhino models (instead of rhino, iges and step). Powertranslator is about 500 USD, stripped version about 300 USD.

If you have rhino3, you should definately try solidtools plugin. Once you have it you cannot miss it.

Gijs

[flipside]

Yeah I just bought this stripped version and it's sooooooo great! The models look very clean, really unbelievable, you can't get same results by 3ds import.

[Gijs]

I forgot to mention solidtools is now part of the bonustools you can download from mcneel:

http://www.rhino3d.com/3/bonus.htm#solid

Gijs