What is Flamingo?

Flamingo brings the raytrace and radiosity rendering to Rhino.

Easy to use, works seamlessly inside Rhino, and provides a host of features that speed and simplify image rendering.

General Features

• Uses both raytracing and radiosity to create sophisticated single-frame images and animations.
  
  
• Automatically calculates indirect light, hard and soft shadows, color bleeding, reflections, translucency, transparency, refraction, highlight, depth of field, and depth attenuation.
  
  
• Supports multiprocessors and background processing.
  
  
• Includes realistic mathematically generated 3-D plants with seasonal variation, giving realistic plants, shadows, and reflections.
  
  
• Works inside Rhino. Render changes to the model immediately. You never need to export or start over.
  
  
• Includes radiosity technology providing unrivaled image quality and accuracy.
  
  
• Interactive raytrace and radiosity rendering.
  
  
• Quick raytrace rendering option with reflections, transparency, and shadows.
  
  
• Progressive-refinement rendering algorithms with on-screen preview.
  
  
• Interactive radiosity solution using OpenGL.
  
  
• Render a partial window.
  
  
• Save and restore plant, exposure, sun and sky, and environment settings.
  
  

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Animation

• Viewpoint animation (for walk-through and fly-by animation).
• Sunlight animation for daily or seasonal shadow studies
• Support for TGA, BMP, PCX, PNG, TIF and JPEG file formats.
  
  

Image Quality

• Combine raytracing and radiosity for highest quality images. Calculates light, shadows, materials, transparency, diffusion, reflection, highlight, Angular Blend, ClearFinish™, and refraction from a surface’s properties. Flamingo’s accurate lighting modeling produces sophisticated effects and high-quality images.
• True specular reflection and transparency
• Shadow casting from all light sources.
• Soft shadow edges, blurry reflection, and translucency.
• Refraction.
• Depth of field.
• Antialiasing with extensive user control.
• 24- or 32-bit color output (16.7 million colors plus alpha channel).

Environment

• Background options include solid color, gradient colors, alpha channel and image map
• Library of background images.
• Ground plane with materials.
• Procedural clouds.
• Depth cue control.
• Haze.
  

Lighting

• Distant, point, spot, linear, rectangular lights, goniometric, sun, ground, and sky.
• Unlimited number of lights.
• Physically based light sources and illumination algorithms.
• Manufacturers photometric (IES) data supported for light fixtures.
• Accurate daylighting simulation (sun, sky, ground, and cloud cover components).
• Sun angle specified by latitude, month, time of day.
• Maps and city lists to select geographical location.
• Exact solar time calculator.
• Graphical adjustment of spot focus for spot lights.
• Shadow casting on/off by object.
• Adjustable light color in RGB or degrees Kelvin.
• Intensity specified in watts.
  

Materials

• Extensive materials library.
• Multiple library support.
• Assign materials by layer or object.
• Interactive material editor with “live” raytraced preview of several materials at the same time.
• Physically based material properties.
• Properties include reflectivity, transparency, highlight, and index of refraction.
• Depth attenuation control for transparent materials.
• Customizable 2- and 3-D procedural textures, including marble, granite, wood, tile, mask, Angular Blend, ClearFinish and blend.
• Complex materials with multiple procedural textures.
• 3-D procedural bump maps, including fine and coarse textures and waves.
• RGB and HSB color systems.
• Extensive bitmap support.
• Support for TGA, BMP, PCX, PNG, TIF and JPEG file formats.
• Color, transparency, and bump mapping.
• Tiled, decal, and background bitmaps.
• Planar, cylindrical, spherical, and U/V projections for decals.
• Multiple bitmaps per object.
• Color exclusion with sensitivity setting.
• Adjustable transparency.
  

Landscaping

• Extensive library with hundreds of fractal-generated 3-D plants including wet and dry climate plants, cold and warm climate plants, groundcover, and house plants.
• Bitmap mask foliage geometry.
• Library browser with multiple previews.
• Generated from simple wireframe objects while rendering.
• Specify size by height or trunk diameter.
• Pruning tools for removing lower branches.
• Foliage density control.
• Seasonal controls.
• Interactive plant editor for creating or modifying plants.