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I became suspicious after an imported step file took ages to render in Rhinoll. It was imported from solidworks. See my tests below. This confirms my suspicision that something is not right. I rebuild the geometry directly in rhino (see 3rd image) to the exact size etc and it rendered much better. Could it be the way Rhino meshes imported geometry. Mcneeel needs to rewrite the algorithim for their meshing. It can take ages to "create rendering meshes" This is one of Rhinos weak points. I can go eat dinner and come back if it is a large scene and I need the mesh to look decent. Anyway here are my quick tests.







Edit: Here is with imported IGES something not right here.

During my last school project I experienced the same thing.
Creating rendering meshes just took forever, and once it started rendering it still took forever...

I was also importing models from solidworks (2004) into rhino. I let some of the renders run for 3 days to get some kind of result...

Problem (for me) is that I can't buy the educational release of solidworks 2006, to be able to use the maxwell plugin there, as the educational release doesn't support 3rd party plugins *bummer*.
And buying solidworks 2006 Full release is just way too expensive for me....

It would be great if mcneel 'solved' this one way or another anyway

A SW sampling level 5 is better than a Rhino sampling level 8? And a Rhino SL 3 looks better than a "import to Rhino" SL 8? I don't understand this. I have thought, the sampling level tell something about the noise. Higher SL -> less noise.

Very strange, it seems to be the same scene but the quality is totaly different.

An other test could be, to render the scene as polygon mesh (import of the same *.3ds) in both - SW and Rhino. Than, the times should be the same. This test would show us, that only the polygon count is the reason for the quality difference.

Eric, your discovery is very interesting. This explains a lot for me!

I do the exact same thing - Build in SW, import to Rhino for the ease of creating a scene and render with MW. I have been wondering why I get more noise than most others, even though my rendering times are longer.

So maybe this is a Rhino issue? But, Flamingo is usually OK with most SW imports. If my STEP files has a bad surface, then I re import just that surface as IGES and it usually fixes it. BUt this doesn't solve the MW/Rhino mesh problem.

Creating scenes in Solidworks sucks, but maybe we need to do it until the final MW?

Yes adamwade. For now I would say avoid importing geometry into rhino to render with maxwell unless it is already a mesh to begin with. Something is happening I think when rhino creates its rendering meshes from this imported geometry. The plugin for solidworks is just as weak as the rhino plug. Without good native texture mapping like the other non cad 3d programs (max, maya, cinema) these plugins for Rhino and Solidworks are very poor. I always feel like I am fighting with the interface. Lets hope they can turn the corner for the final release. I will just wait and see what happens with the standalone for now, or export to cinema if I need textures in my scene. Even that plugin is crippled. NL bit off way more than they can chew on all these plugins, but I hope they can get it all sorted out in the end. Im rooting for them.

Eric,

I did the same test, but the images looked the same at the same sample level. (it was only 320x240 though). The interseting part was that the Rhino cube was about 5400 triangles and the imported STEP from SW was only about 2400 triangles.

Eric,

Just curious: if you take the Rhino native cube (that you just drew) and export it into a step file and then re-import back it into Rhino, will it produce different noise ?

adamwade wrote:Eric,

I did the same test, but the images looked the same at the same sample level. (it was only 320x240 though). The interseting part was that the Rhino cube was about 5400 triangles and the imported STEP from SW was only about 2400 triangles.

So now it works the same with imported and native? This is weird. Are you sure? What sampling level did you let it go to? I have had every model I bring into Rhino from Solidworks bog down in maxwell in a huge way. Thomas I would like to test out exporing from Rhino as step and reimporting. I will not be able to get to it until next week though. If anyone else wants to try out the Step file you can download it here http://www.ericlagman.com/Cube_Scene_STEP.zip

Just to be complete: I also have constant problems ro render imported meshes from Nevercenter Silo with Rhinoll.
I simply can't assign any of the Maxwell-shaders to them - they'll stay white. In the second case I rebuilt this object with the meshtonurb-command: It is a Nurbs-polysurface now.
In this state it will render out with the assigned plastic-material.

This technique doesn't solve the problem, as the meshtonurb command is limited to VERY simple objects. Using it on complex objects would be fatal, as it produces ridiculouly complex objects. It simply replaces every mesh-face with a tiny Nurbs-surface.

Holger

All renderings used diffused materials - 1 emitter.

Basically, I am getting the same rendering times and samples for a Rhino cube and a SW cube. My Rhino cube was built using a primitive cube, then radiusing the edges.

However, STEP files as I understand, are simply IGES files with added information. This means that in SW, when you export a STEP you can access the options list (and you will see a list of file types - choose IGES) and in here change the IGES surface representation type from STANDARD to MASTERCAM. Make sure you have the export 3D curves off as well. I have found that the Mastercam setting imports more successfully. There are many other to try as well, but it's tedious.

Anyway, look at my images and you will see that the Mastercam setting has less artifacts than the Standard IGES. Maybe this will help.