The Rhino RDK is a collection of tools that extend the Rhino application platform with visualization specific capabilities. In particular, the RDK provides:
Features
- 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.
- Texture mapping support for Rhino 3.0 (already built into Rhino 4.0).
- 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 both the Rhino 3.0 and 4.0 SDKs to add renderer specific functionality to both platforms.
The current RDK SDK installer can be downloaded from here:
http://download.mcneel.com/rdk/1.0/redirect/rdk_sdk.asp
The current RDK plug-in installer can be downloaded from here:
http://download.mcneel.com/rdk/1.0/redirect/rdk_plugin.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.
