

I think our viewport dimensions are going to work just fine. Right now, we're using the resolution of the viewport and if I want to change that, I can click either set a custom resolution or grab one of these standard resolutions. So this is basically telling Rhino how big of an image we want to render and at what quality level to render with. Let's take a look at resolution and quality. That usually makes the most sense for me. I'm going to set this to specific viewport and we'll work with the perspective viewport.

Now, this is a little bit tricky sometimes because if you accidentally switch to a different viewport, you might end up rendering the top or the front and you didn't actually mean to do that. We can decide which view we want to render. So we already talked about the current renderer, we're just going to use the Rhino renderer, that's all we have access to right now. And we'll take a look at some of the most basic render settings.

Down here at the bottom we have render properties so let's go ahead and click to activate that. For now, though, we're just going to focus on the built-in renderer. There are other more sophisticated rendering plugins out there that will do even more in depth rendering than what's built into Rhino. We can set the current renderer and for now the built-in Rhino renderer is our only option. We can set up different kinds of lights, as well as adjust materials that are applied to our Rhino objects. And here we can do things like activate a render preview or a full-on render. So we can find render commands in Rhino under the render menu. Here, we've got a few different objects that we worked with in previous videos and we'll use those as some test subjects for rendering. To help us get a feel for rendering in Rhino I've got the exercise file rendering-setup.3dm open. And if you want to, you can spend just as much time setting up renders as you do building your models, if not more. It's definitely an art form all on its own. Now, the rendering process can be just as sophisticated as the modeling process. Rendering is a process that combines the objects in a Rhino file with simulated lights and simulated materials to produce digital images.
