If you’ve used V-Ray for Rhino before, you’ll immediately notice that this portion of the interface has been dramatically reworked.

It’ll also bring up the V-Ray dialog window. You’ll find a new menu is added to the pulldown and a small toolbar gives you access to the most common Rhino integrated commands, including light creation and depth of field focus control. Getting up and running with V-Ray for Rhino is pretty straightforward. It’s then a case of configuring V-ray how you want it - either running as default or, if you have shared resources for textures and materials (V-Ray makes sharing standardised materials very easy), then you’ll need to point the various folders to where they need to go.

Then place all your files where you need them. If you’ve used Rhino with plug-ins before, you’ll know that installation is pretty straightforward - open up the Rhi file and it’ll sort itself out.

So let’s dig into what it does, how it does it and what you can produce with it. It’s currently available for 3ds max, Revit, Blender, SketchUp, Modo, Maya, Cinema 4D, Form-Z, and of course, Rhino. If you’ve not come across V-Ray before, it’s essentially a singular physically-based rendering system that has been developed for integration in a wide spread of 3D modelling and visualisation systems. This month, we’re going to take an indepth look at the latest update to one of these - namely, V-Ray for Rhino - which costs £220 per year and is developed by the Bulgarian team at Chaos Group. While Rhino has its own built-in rendering tools and its own add-ons (Flamingo and more recently, McNeel has built in the open source Cycles renderer), there are a range of third-party vendors looking to add their own special brand of magic. One of the most popular classes of add-on is rendering and visualisation.

The final reason for its popularity is, I suspect, the huge wealth of third-party add-ons that are available. It’s also very good value for money – the list price is 995 Euros – no subscription, no maintenance costs – and this includes the powerful Grasshopper visual scripting tool. It can create incredible forms from scratch and import and export a huge array of data types. Rhino is hugely popular among architects for its advanced surface modelling capabilities.

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