Technical illustration

A technical picture to illustrate

By using Rhino 3D and Photoshop we can produce a nice illustration picture for technical look.
You can also produce this with MAX or other 3D renderer but that won't give you a really good pic because of polygon look.

Using nurbs is better for this kind of illustrations because the curves define only the contour of the object and not all the surface as the mesh object would do.

You need Photoshop because you can't use PSP for this kind of nice fading between wire and rendered picture.

Rendering of the pictures

	1 - Open your objectin Rhino assign texture and material properties and do a rendering, you may change the angle of view for a nice photographic effect. When the rendering is finished, you can open Photoshop and paste the picture in it.
	2 - Never change the windows size or viewport focusing to this step and the next. - Active the RenderCurves rendering option and do a second render. - Paste the pic in Photoshop as a new layer.
	3 - Change materials properties of the object to: Shine=0 and Transparency=255 - Select the object and convert it to curve (ConvertToCurves). - Be shure to have the option:"Use light on layer that are of" no checked in the rendering tab setting. If You want more curves, then change the display density with "CP" -1: value only display trimming boundaries, 0: isoparms at knots 1: Must be the default 2 to x: A lotmore, You can consult the Rhino help file to see the exact way how thisworks. Do a third render with! "Rendercurves" option On and paste the pic in Photoshop as a new layer.
	4 - You can close Rhino. In Photoshop you have now 3Layers, then you just have to erase some layers parts according where you want curves and where you want texture. The best tool to use is probably the eraser with some smooth border. The more intuitive way to sort the layers is to put the texture picture as background, and the Curve on the last layer. Hide the middle layer and start erasing the curve where you want a textured + curve object. When it's OK, Hide the curves, show and active the middle layer, Control + click on the Curve layer, invert the selection and delete. Now you can use the eraser to place the parts where you want only Texture. Show back all the layers, the picture is done.

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