Setting up light in GH

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 31, 2017 at 12:39am

Grasshopper previews should be rendered using the Rhino lighting model in the current document. At least if you're in Shaded or Rendered mode. You'll have to add the light objects to the Rhino document though, as Grasshopper has no idea what lights are or how they ought to be used.

If everything can be hooked up to a single slider, you should even be able to generate the animation by animating the slider.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 31, 2017 at 1:08am

Made the following. Uses the new CustomDisplay features available in the latest Rhino WIP + GH. Good reason to try it out if you're not already. The animation was made using Rendered display mode and a groundplane with a material.

Attachments:

• light animation.gh, 14 KB

Permalink Reply by Kaiho Yu on June 6, 2017 at 11:06am

Hi David, thank you for you reply, it is very helpful. The only problem is that the old grasshopper material preview can only recognize one light source in Rhino, it seems the WIP + Gh would solve this problem, can't wait to try it.

For my problem I end up using V-ray to render the animation, which means I set up the frames and it bakes the geometries in frame, render it, delete it, then bake the next frame. 

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on May 31, 2017 at 4:37pm

There is a fairly simple way of dynamically baking geometry to a Rhino layer using the Human and/or Elefront plugins that I use all the time. It simply replaces the geometry any time GH recalculates. That way you can use any rendering plugin and all shading modes of Rhino, but still have everything update dynamically if you change things in Grasshopper, including animation.

Check my answer at the bottom here for the main part: http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/a-solid-baked-dynamic-pre...

Obviously its not the most elegant solution, but it works surprisingly well.

Permalink Reply by Kaiho Yu on June 6, 2017 at 11:09am

Thanks Armin. I used this way of making animation. I didn't use Elefront this time, however it seems to be a fantastic plug-in. I used Dragonfly + VB to render animation automatically. 

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on June 6, 2017 at 11:14am

Cool, yes there is countless ways to achieve this. I also exported animations using Anemone and some VB to export a .obj for each frame. Then I use a .obj sequence importer in Maya for setting up the animation and render it in Octane render. This works pretty well and if you have lots of objects its just so much faster. Also all the lighting setup, etc. is much easier in something like Maya or Cinema4D.

@David Rutten: How come the Rhino viewport is so slow with instances. Its crippling, even when they are instances of blocks. It just slows down so much. I mean even the render window of Octane is more fluid then the Rhino viewport. Isn't instancing the most widly used thing to speed up rendering?

Permalink Reply by Kaiho Yu on June 6, 2017 at 11:17am

Oh that's awesome, never thought of using maya or Cinema 4D to render GH animations. Thanks for sharing this!

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on June 6, 2017 at 11:24am

This was done like that for example:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/video/midi-data-to-animation

The .obj importer plugin for maya: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/script/obj-sequences-import-export-f... (not 100% sure it was that one, but I guess they would all work)

Obviously the .obj sequence route makes most sense if you have changing geometry. If there is just animation but no deformation, then other ways would make more sense, because the .obj sequence is a lot of data.

What's nice, is that you can use Maya to export the sequence as an alembic file. Then you can use it in any 3D software really, since alembic support is pretty good. The animation at the top is actually rendered in Octane Standalone using the alembic file, since its much easier to use and reliable then the Octane Plugin for Maya.