64-bit version for Rhino 5

Stereo rendering

Caustics

Custom area light shapes

Export outlines as vectors (in SVG format)

Faster scene export

Micha Mehnert used the RhinoAir plug-in to render with Air from within Rhino. Many of these rendering styles are available as a single-click button on the RhinoAir Illustration toolbar.

Rendering

Once the plugin and toolbars are installed, rendering is simple as selecting a button from the Air Render toolbar:

The toolbar includes buttons for one-click global illumination, ambient occlusion, and outline rendering. Each feature can be configured using a page in the Rhino document properties dialog.

Robust Support for Geometric Primitives

Air renders NURB surfaces directly. No pre-meshing in Rhino is required. Of course if you need to render polymeshes or would like to use a mesh to render a NURB surface, Air efficiently renders polygons as well. Air renders smooth curves, dimensions, and text as true 3D entities with full anti-aliasing. Air offers additional primitives not available in other renderers including subdivision surfaces, blobbies and volume primitives.

Materials

The RhinoAir plugin translates existing Rhino materials for rendering with Air, allowing you to start rendering with your existing materials immediately.

For more advanced materials, use any of the more than 60 surface and displacement shaders included with Air to produce a wide range of material appearances. (No programming required.) Edit and preview materials right inside the regular Rhino properties dialog.

For users wishing to create custom shaders, Air includes the Vshade shader creation tool for easily constructing shaders by connecting predesigned blocks.

Displacement

True render-time, sub-pixel, micro-polygon displacement is supported. Displacement patterns can come from a texture map or be generated by a procedural shader.

Rapid Prototyping

Displacement can be used to apply complex textures to surfaces, and the resulting displaced surfaces can be saved as meshes for manufacturing.

Global Illumination

Easy-to-use global illumination effects from true indirect lighting with color bleeding or fast ambient occlusion. GI and occlusion caches can be saved to a file and re-used to accelerate re-rendering.

Lighting

All standard Rhino light types are supported, including linear lights and rectangular area lights, with per-light control over shadow blur and sampling for soft shadows.

Illustration

The Air Illustration toolbar has buttons for one-click rendering in different styles without scene modification. Sample images.

DarkTree Shaders

In addition to Air’s extensive shader library, use any of the 300+ advanced procedural DarkTree shaders available from Darkling Simulations.

Flexible Output

Save multiple output values from a single rendering for later compositing, at 8-bit, 16-bit, or floating-point precision. Render standard passes (diffuse, specular, reflections, etc) to a multilayer PSD or EXR file ready for tweaking in your favorite 2D paint program.

Distributed Rendering

Multiple machines can be used to render a single image (a separate Air license is required for each machine).

Subsurface Scattering

Depth of Field

Bongo and View-based Animation

Render Bongo animations with Air straight from Rhino. The RhinoAir plugin also has integrated support for basic turntable, fly-through, and camera path animation. Animated frames render as a separate process, allowing you to continue to work in Rhino while rendering.

Other features

Most scene and object properties for AIR are scriptable via commands included in the plugin. The plugin does not use the Rhino RDK, and it should be compatible with other renderers you may already have installed.

Download the demo version

Buy…

LEDAS Ltd today announced the release of version 4.0 of LGS 3D, its powerful geometric constraint solver. This is the core technology for parametric design software, allowing users to express their design intent in 3D parts and assemblies through geometric and dimensional constraints.

Version 4.0 introduces important new functions that customers will find useful for assembly design and direct modeling. It also significantly improves reliability and performance.

LGS 3D v4 introduces (infinite) cone and torus objects. They can be fixed, or be linked with other objects with different constraints: coincidence, tangency, parallelism, perpendicularity, and angular dimensions. In the context of assembly designs, cone and torus objects are used to model spatial and kinematic relationships in mechanisms, such as bearings and variators. In direct modeling applications, they can represent fillets and chamfers, and they adjust their form to satisfy constraints. For example, cones can change their angles and tori change any of their radii. In addition to non-rigid cylindrical and spherical surfaces introduced in previous versions of LGS 3D, cone and tori now allow users to models many kinds of parametrized mechanical parts, such as brackets, bearings, and hinges.

An important function introduced with LGS 3D v4 computes the degrees of freedom (DOF) of parts in mechanisms. Any rigid set in LGS 3D can have up to three translational and three rotational DOFs. When rigid sets are linked by constraints to other fixed objects, the appropriate DOFs are eliminated automatically. A new function returns the number of remaining DOFs for a particular rigid set. Also returned is geometric information, such as directions and axes. LGS-based applications can now represent this data to the end user, a feature that has been highly requested for kinematic analysis.

LGS 3D v4 supports tangency constraints with parametric curves and surfaces that represent non-canonic objects. These features are used to express complex kinematic relations in advanced mechanisms.

Also new in LGS 3D is its ability to deform canonic curves and surfaces when they are moved under constraints. This applies specifically to circles, cylinders, spheres, cones and tori. (In previous versions, the deformation was limited to static constraint solving.) Version 4 also generates the correct diagnostics for models with these non-rigid objects.

A new LGS 3D function returns information about loops in over-defined constraints. (In previous versions, users were only alerted to the condition and were provided no additional information.) Version 4 now allows constraint relaxation to be applied independently of each over-defined loop. This means that it is now faster for users to make their models consistent.

Version 4.0 of LGS 3D contains significant advances in reliability and performance. A new analysis on inconsistent models improves performance three-fold. The technical and algorithmic optimization on large models with thousands constraints increases the performance of LGS 3D by 10-25%.

LGS 3D v4 also contains enhancements to its API that provide better context management and more detailed journaling.

“Version 4.0 really is a ‘major’ release,” explained Alexey Ershov, Director of Research and Development at LEDAS. “We are not only introducing important extensions, but for the first time are providing full solutions to both assembly and part modeling.”

Since the first commercial release in 2004, LGS 2D and 3D software components have been licensed by a dozen CAD/CAM/CAE vendors, who have embedded the components into their applications successfully.

The 2D and 3D geometric constraint solvers are used as parametric engines for 2D sketching and drawing, 3D direct modeling, assembly design, motion analysis, and other applications. LGS 2D and 3D are cross-platform software packages running on 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, AIX, HP-UX, and other operating systems. Both solvers have a C-style API for easy integration into a broad range of software applications using a variety of wrappers, such as .NET, Java, and C++.

LGS 2D/3D supports the creation and modification of geometric models through explicit and implicit constraints. Geometric objects that can be constrained include points, lines, circles, ellipses, planes, cylinders, spheres, cones, tori, NURBS, application-defined parametric curves, and surfaces. Objects can be fixed in the absolute coordinate system or relative to each other. Supported constraints include geometric relations between objects (coincidence, parallelism, tangency, and so on) and dimensions that specify the required values for distances, angles, and radii. LGS 2D/3D moves and rotates objects to positions that satisfy all constraints, yet minimizes transformations from initial configurations.

Other LGS functions implement advanced features of CAD/CAM/CAE systems, such as diagnostics of over- and under-defined parts of models, engineering variables and equations, help points, and tolerance management.

Available as free downloads from the LEDAS web site are “Lege’n’d 2D/3D” example applications. These consist of sample models representing different kinds of 2D sketches and 3D assemblies. The applications can be used to test the functionality, robustness, and performance of LGS 2D/3D. They were created with the Open CASCADE open-source application framework; the source code is available to all licensees.

To learn more about LGS 2D/3D, visit the LEDAS Web site at www.ledas.com/products/lgs3d.