Penguin brings freehand sketching, watercolour painting and cartoon-like rendering to Rhino.
Penguin is a conceptual, sketch and cartoon, non-photometric scan line renderer. With Penguin you can create stylised images of your models with an artistic look for enhanced graphic and visual appeal.
Penguin has three main styles: technical, ink stroke and cartoon - shown left compared with a Flamingo rendering. The line widths are adjustable and the fill colours can be controlled independently of the material colour.
Penguin runs inside Rhino and has the same system requirements.
Penguin 2.0 is completely integrated with Rhino. All of its configuration dialogs can be accessed as any other Rhino dialog would be, inside Rhino properties or object properties.
The dockable object properties panel updates while other commands run or while changing the selection.
Penguin 2.0 supports any Rhino native object, including 2D objects like dimensions or curves. You can define specific settings for those objects like any other object.
Penguin 2.0 comes with new shaders and a new shader engine. Now shaders are separete into main shaders – you can only select one of those at the same time, and combinable shaders – you can add any one of those to the main shaders or use them standalone. Penguin 2.0 includes three main shaders (Cartoon, Artistic and Photo) and one combinable shader (Sketch). Given its scalable architecture, more shaders can easily be added in the future.
Penguin 2.0 supports cast shadows in any shader or mix of shaders and can save a separate bitmap with the shadow planes.
In Penguin 2.0 you can define specific settings for every object in the document. These settings appear in the object properties window, and are set up in the same way than the global document settings. You can select any shader to an object.
Objects are rendered taking their transparency property into account.
Export a render into a vector format. The current supported formats are PS, EPS, AI, PDF and SVG. More formats could be added in the future.
Penguin 2.0 adds a new viewport display option to Rhino. It is a real time approximation of what the render with Penguin would be.
When using the sketch shader, you can check hidden lines rendering, and you will see them in both the render and the real time display.
Penguin settings are saved inside the files, so that you can share them between computers or restore those settings at any time in the future.
Penguin 2.0 medium antialias option is the equivalent of high antialias in Penguin 1.0. The new high antialias option has even more quality.
The advice relating to Hardware and Operating System options for Rhino3d are all relevant to Penguin:
Rhino3d and Penguin System Requirements
There are also some sample workstations suitable for rendering with Penguin or any of the other popular rendering plug-ins for Rhino 3d here:
Rhino3d & Rendering Workstations