Rhino materials and textures in Blender
Exported files carry Rhino's materials poorly: colours survive, but texture placement, PBR channels and per-face assignments are often lost, and every re-export overwrites whatever you fixed by hand in Blender. Rhino2Blender rebuilds each material as a Blender shader, and keeps it in step as you change it in Rhino.
PBR materials
Rhino's physically based materials map channel by channel onto Blender's Principled BSDF:
- Base Color to Base Color
- Metallic to Metallic
- Roughness to Roughness
- Emission to Emission Color and Strength
- Opacity to Alpha or transmission
- Bump to Normal
Older Rhino materials
Materials that aren't PBR are read from their diffuse colour, transparency, reflectivity and shine, then built as glass, metal, emission or a standard Principled material, whichever fits.
Textures land where Rhino puts them
- Mapping-channel textures use Rhino's own texture coordinates, including custom mappings set on the object.
- WCS and WCS box projections are rebuilt as shader nodes, measured in Rhino's model units.
- Each texture's repeat, offset and rotation carry over.
Images cross the link once. A map shared by many materials is sent a single time and cached, and reconnecting skips the ones Blender already has.
One object, several materials
When faces of one Brep carry different materials in Rhino, Blender gets one material slot per material on the right faces. There's no need to split the object first.
Your materials win
Replace a material in Blender and the sync stops reclaiming that slot, in later syncs and after reopening the file. You can start from Rhino's materials and refine them in Blender without losing the work. To give a whole layer one material, see Rhino layers and blocks in Blender.
The details, including the few limits, are in Materials and textures.