Rhino + V-Ray: Textures

Rhino

Rhino is a great modeling environment, for which it needs a great deal of information about geometry, calculating intersections, making offsets, snapping new points to old points, and all of that. It needs to be able to render, but not necessarily all that well. In fact, it does pretty well, but for super-duper renderings, most people use one or another of several alternative plug-ins.

V-Ray

V-Ray is not a modeling environment, but it is a rendering package. As such, it has built into it notions about what geometry is, what attributes it has, what materials (textures) are, and what attributes they have, as well as a whole bunch of cool stuff about how light works in the environment.

The "Plug-in" relationship

To work together Rhino and V-Ray must pass data back and forth. Since they are both concerned with geometry its appearance, they agree on the vast majority of what is important. To make the connection as seamless as possible, they share some vocabulary. Thus, when you inspect object "properties" you can see either the "Basic" Rhino properties, or the "V-Ray" properties depending on which one you want to see. The dialog boxes are separate, but to some extent they are editing the same data. This is the source of some frustration.

There are some differences, too, either because V-Ray needs additional information for some things (rendering, for example) or their authors made different decisions about how to do some things.

[report bug]