Features

The Rhino RDK is a collection of tools that extend the Rhino application platform with visualization specific capabilities. In particular, the RDK provides:

A fully extensible Material, Environment and Texture Editor.
A full frame buffer implementation with post and channel handling.
A pre-process custom mesh provision interface for 3rd party developers.
Displacement mapping.
Procedural textures.
An improved render pipeline.
A Rhino Sunlight.
Property animation registration for Bongo 2.0 and other 3rd party animators.
Automatic shader UI support for 3rd party Material/Environment/Texture providers.
UI widgets for developers.

Many of these tools are available to Rhino users in their raw form, but the RDK’s real power is as a platform for developers of rendering software.

SDK downloads.

The RDK is a C++ SDK that integrates with the Rhino 4.0 SDK to add renderer specific functionality to both platforms.

For end-users

The current RDK plug-in installer can be downloaded from here:

http://download.mcneel.com/rdk/1.0/redirect/rdk_plugin.asp

For software developers only.

The current RDK SDK installer can be downloaded from here:

http://download.mcneel.com/rdk/1.0/redirect/rdk_sdk.asp

When developing your RDK-aware render plug-in, you will need the SDK installed on your workstation. When distributing your plug-in, you will need to include the RDK installer as part of your own plug-in installer. To do this, simply install the RDK plug-in installer into the temp folder, and run it using the /silent command line option.

The RDK includes a demonstration project called Marmalade which you will find in the C:\Program Files\Rhino RDK\Marmalade folder. This plug-in shows how to set up your paths for header and lib files, and demonstrates many common RDK tasks such as creating custom materials and using the frame buffer.

A complete version of this text is part of the SDK download.

Example images.

Displacement has been migrated into its own plugin, available here .

Procedural textures :

Sunlight calculator :