Neon 1.0 Beta 7 Now Available

Hi all!

There's a new Neon!

http://v5.rhino3d.com/group/neon

This is a pretty huge new release.  There’s a new “Neon Material” type which adds glossy reflection and refraction along with Fresnel reflections (car paint/porcelain style).  If you have Rhino Render current, you can change one of your plain vanilla materials to the new Neon material by right-clicking it and choosing “Change (copy similar settings)”.

We have also improved the “HUD” (head up display).  There’s now a pause button and a lock button.  Pause stops the rendering – lock makes it so that no changes actually take hold, so the rendering will continue even if you start moving stuff around.  You can also change the number of passes by right-clicking on the max pass number at the end of the bar.

We’ve also started to support some of the display mode settings – so you can now have something that approximates a Neon “shaded mode”.  Most important, perhaps, is the support for custom display mode backgrounds – you can set a color color or background image and still use the environment for lighting and reflections.

One *big* caveat.  Existing Neon users may find that their display mode is set to “Solid Color” by default.  This is because of an error in the original display mode definition which wasn’t picked by because we didn’t support it.  Since we now allow you to change the display mode to whatever you like, and the values stick….then it means that values that are erroneous will stick too.

A complete list of changes from Beta 6c is below:

• Added a new Command "NeonHUD" to toggle the visibility of the Neon status overlay
• Added a new Command "NeonRenderControl" to allow pausing the rendering of Neon and locking Neon from restarting from updates.
• Neon will now automatically pause and resume while the user runs any of these commands: Render, RenderPreview, RenderInWindow, RenderWindow, or ReduceMesh.
• Removed Neon HUD from ViewCaptureToFile/Clipboard captures.
• Fully support the different RDK procedural noise types.
• Support Rhino Display Appearance "Color & Material usage" settings.
• Support Rhino Display Appearance "Background" settings.
• Support Rhino Display Appearance "Flat Shading" setting.
• Support Rhino Display Appearance "Lighting Method" settings except "No Lighting".
• Support Rhino Display Appearance "Use lights on layers that are off" setting.

Bug Fixes

• Neon no longer overwrites changes to the display mode settings.
• Neon retains document settings such as max passes correctly.
• Fixed two-point perspective "missing function" error.
• Raytraced (Neon) display mode now defaults to "Use Renderer" as the background mode.

Notes

• When a new update happens and Neon is paused, it will unpause and start rendering unless it is also locked.
• If Neon is locked, nothing the user does should cause a restart. All the updates are cached and ready to be processed when unlocked.
• If Neon is locked and the scene is modified, the wireframes will not match.
• Sparse convolution noise is really slow and does not work in the bump slots.

Enjoy!