Product designers have used photorealistic rendering of final designs for years. But one area has been impractical until now—using photoreal visualization early on during the design process, while still iterating on a product design. In fact, most designers are just used to doing without it or saving it for the end of the process, as the existing technology has been difficult to use and too slow to fit into the process.
NVIDIA Iray for Rhino is a rendering plug-in for designers using McNeel Rhinoceros® that lets them view physically based photorealistic visualizations of their models while they work.
Physically based rendering (PBR) has been around for several years, and refers to using realistic shading and lighting, while simulating the physical behavior of materials and lights. With PBR, designers can view physically accurate models, which reduces the need for educated guesses when it comes to design material decisions. How does a second layer of clear coat affect the appearance of a textured surface of a product? How will changes to plastics, glass, or polymer colors appear in real life? Questions like these can be answered quickly and reliably with Iray for Rhino.
Even though PBR isn’t new, this plug-in is revolutionary in its ability to harness the power of NVIDIA Quadro® GPUs and Iray to enable design iteration using photoreal visualization on the fly. Designers can stay in the creative flow as they make their modifications, without having to take a lunch break or wait overnight for photoreal renders. One of the great things about Iray is the scalability of performance with GPUs. For the ultimate in rendering power, users can use the Quadro Visual Computing Appliance (VCA), a network-attached appliance that massively accelerates the time to noiseless physically based global illumination.
These charts give you an idea of the performance scaling up the Quadro desktop and mobile product range.
Iray is integrated into Rhino, rendering directly within the viewport to offer continual, accurate feedback as designers craft their model’s form, materials, and lighting—all without specialized knowledge or a complex setup. Designers can easily create or modify physically based lights and materials with an integrated material editor. All the materials and lights, including the NVIDIA vMaterials Library, are built with the NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL), and they can be shared with other MDL-compatible tools.
MDL is render-agnostic, defining physically based materials and lights so designers can access a common library—or create their own. MDL aims to help bridge the divide between 3D design applications by making materials and lights available from end-to-end in the design process. They’re portable from one design tool to the next, so engineering, industrial design, and marketing departments can all exchange 3D designs without losing their material definitions. That means no more throwing away valuable design work and starting over at each stage of the process.
Another tool for facilitating advanced rendering is the NVIDIA vMaterials catalog, a free suite of 600+ and continually growing curated and calibrated real-world materials described in MDL. Designed and verified by NVIDIA’s material specialists for accuracy, control, and consistency, vMaterials provide a fast, reliable way to add realistic materials to product designs. Users can easily browse, change, and adjust materials to get just the look that’s needed within the supported applications. While vMaterials is the perfect addition to the Iray plug-in products, it can be used in any application that supports NVIDIA MDL.
In addition, NVIDIA Iray® Server is a software solution that provides distributed Iray rendering across networked machines. It uses a common installation and license to deliver traditional offline batch rendering with Iray Queuing and interactive rendering with Iray Streaming to all NVIDIA Iray plug-in products, without the need to install any other application. All machines running Iray Server coordinate with each other to reduce the time needed to render an image. This allows a render farm to process poster-size images in a fraction of the time of a single machine. Streaming is a professional feature that’s constrained to a single machine and only works with Quadro and NVIDIA Tesla® GPUs.
NVIDIA Iray rendering technology is a big step in democratizing interactive photoreal design visualization using physically based rendering. Now, Rhino users can take advantage of the NVIDIA for Rhino promotion and try Iray rendering solutions free by registering for the 90-day trial today.
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