I use Rhino quite often at work, and blender for modeling, but now I am looking at creating a basic diagrammatic animation with eevee and I would like to match Rhino’s viewport render style, which is, like Eevee, fully interactive in the viewport.
I’ve played in Eevee quite a bit with ambient occlusion and with HDRs but still I can’t come up to anything close to what I can get in Rhino.
@jesterKing any ideas about what Rhino is doing behind the scenes and how it could be matched in Eevee?
Example from Rhino with viewport set to rendered and with sun on:
And the best that I can come up with in Eevee with the sun set in the same position and an HDR background, and ambient occlussion with the following settings:
Hmm, not sure. I haven’t played with it yet too understand how it works. Arctic mode uses simple SSAO. Further there is indeed GI using completely white environment (I think).
Maybe the global GI would equate to using iraddiance volume portal in Eevee. The trouble is that the irradiance volumes need to be baked which takes time and is dependent on fixed geometry.
Turn the HDRI way down, since eevee A) does not have bounced light and B) doesnt cast shadows from hdri youre basically overexposing your shadows by having a super bright hdri… consider an HDRI like a fill light in eevee at this point.
And use an area light with soft shadows instead of the sun. You’ll have the same look
I tried a portion of the model in a new file with the sun only on and the look-dev preview. I am not using filmic and it’s a little better, but still nowhere near as good as the Rhino viewport render.
There is a directionality to the light in the rhino screenshot that is missing with a flat background, So I added a couple gradient textures to bring a bit more of that back.
I was curious what would happen in EV Express with default material (nearly white) and standard EV Express settings + a thin freestyle line: (update: I added also a nodegroup in compositor that plays around with normals).
Scene contains no HDRI because EEVEE doesn’t play nice yet with HDRI’s. So all lights, and added a little bit of AO in compositor. Material is standard principled shader. Baked indirect light.
@dimitarsp EV Express takes care of settings for the lights, render settings, settings for the probes and a bunch of more features like light-rigs, camera settings, global shader, compositing nodes. There are some presets as well. In case Sketchup works with freestyle as well, is it an option to use LANpr (eh, forgot the name), which is a blender build that provides an alternative to freestyle? If you like very thin lines, is Workbench (another render-engine in blender) not an option? Note: EV Express is not designed for very large scenes, it’s suitable to showcase your model.
@chippwalters Does Sketchup use freestyle or are you using another method?
Thanks all for your input. I seem to be getting somewhere. I didn’t know about the ambient node for the material setup. It seems to significantly help things.
For the image below, I also used a wireframe modifier with a dark material to get the edge to render nicely.
I have yet to try the gradient gradient world settings mentioned by @SterlingRoth
World is using the forest look dev hdri found in the blender install location\datafiles\studiolights\world\ with the usual setup to not show the hdri in the background:
