What's this page for anyhow?
Rhino users can find comprehensive help files and tutorials installed with Rhino or on the web. This wiki page provides a few additional Rhino 4 demos that may be of interest. These are not complete step by step tutorials but are rather more informational in nature with the hope of exposing commands and techniques previously unknown to the reader.
Aside from Rhino being a very powerful 3D design and modeling tool it is also a host application for hundreds of third party plugins . These plugins often extend the power of Rhino in a very specific area such as reverse engineering or photo-realistic rendering. One goal of this wiki page is to provide brief and simple explanations of how to use some of these plugins within Rhino. This page will be updated as I try more of the plugins available for Rhino. If a plugin is not listed here it doesn't mean that it's not a good one, just one that I don't know yet.
This page will also cover some of the labs plugins available on our Rhino labs page . These are tools that are developed internally and can be tried by users prior to their likely inclusion in the next major release of Rhino.
Contents
(anything in Blue is a command... just type it in the command line of Rhino and presto!)
Rhino 4 Demos & Models
Famous Furniture Collection #2
Here's a second collection of famous furniture designs modeled in Rhino using reference photos. The sample images were rendered in Brazil for Rhino... Enjoy!
Famous Furniture Collection #2
Famous Furniture Collection #1
Here are some models of a few famous furniture designs. These 3DM files were modeled for use in renderings made with Brazil r/s 2 for Rhino . If you have the most recent beta of Brazil installed and chosen as your current renderer, all you'll have to do is click render... Enjoy!
Famous Furniture Collection #1
Let's make a boot!
First download this Rhino file of a basic boot form . You can make a surface like this yourself if you like by drawing some curves and using the commands NetworkSrf or Sweep2. If you're not familiar with these read about them in the Command Help dialog found in the Help drop down menu of Rhino.
The first two commands you'll want to use are Cap to close up the open ends of our boot shape and FilletEdge to round the outer edge of the sole (I used a radius of 5 for the fillet seen above)
The next step is to draw some curves for the shape of the treads on the bottom of your boot. The image above on the left shows the four curves in red that you should make first. Use the Curve command to start drawing and make sure you're in the top viewport. Remember you can always draw one curve and then copy and paste it to make the others.
Then array the four curves using the Array command while still in the top viewport to pattern the curves along the length of the sole. If you draw the first four curves in roughly the same spot as shown above you can use these exact numbers for arraying them (number in X direction = 10, Y and Z = 1 / spacing = 22).
After the curves are arrayed use the command ExtractSrf to select the very bottom of the boot as well as the fillet surface to separate them from the rest of the boot. Make sure you join these two surfaces as well with the Join command after they're extracted... we'll be selecting them together later on and this will make it a lot easier on you.
Now use the Split command (choosing the curves you've drawn as the cutting objects) to split the bottom two surfaces of the boot into multiple pieces. Then select the skinny bits (as shown above in the middle image) and delete them. You can also Hide the cutting curves now as we won't be using them again. The next step is to select alternating pieces of the sole and move them down slightly. Hold down the shift key to select the surfaces at the same time and then move them down a little in the front viewport. If you're moving the surfaces in the perspective viewport you can hold down the ctrl key to lock your movements up and down.
Now you'll need to use two commands over and over again... remember that right click a.k.a. enter will launch the last used command. The first command is BlendSrf, read the prompts in the command line to see what Rhino wants you to select next and remember, right click=enter. Make sure Auto Chain is set to Yes in the command line when using BlendSrf this will help you work faster. Then select the edges opposite one another along the boot sole bottom. BlendSrf wants two segments total before making the blend surface. After one whole edge is selected (which should be one click if Auto Chain is on) press enter to select the second segment and then enter once more. A dialog box with the title "Adjust Blend Buldge" will pop up... enter 0 in both of the fields and press enter.
You'll notice that as you complete more of these blend surfaces there are gaps remaining around the perimeter of the sole. We'll use Sweep2 for these spots. Again, read the command line to find out what Rhino wants you to select. Use the horizontal edges as the rails and the other edges of each hole as the cross sections... the default settings in the dialog box are fine... just press enter. On the heel we have to use the Chain Edges option in the command line before selecting the first rail. To learn more about Sweep2 enter it into CommandHelp.
If all went well, your boot sole should look like the image above on the left. Now use ExtractSrf again to remove and delete the top surface of the boot. After that, turn on the control points for the main surface of the boot using PointsOn. This command displays the control points for the surface... we can move these points using a variety of tools in Rhino. In the front viewport, select the top two rows of control points by dragging a fence selection around them. Then raise these two rows of points up as far as you'd like. You can also enlarge the opening at the top of the boot by selecting the top row of points and using the command Scale2D while in the top viewport. Starting the scale operation from the center of this row of points will make the result more predictable. Play around and see if you can get your boot to look like the image above. Once you're done use the PointsOff command to turn off the control points.
The final step is to make some handles for our boot. Use the Ellipse command to draw an ellipse in the front viewport... this will be the size and shape of our handles. Then use the Trim command to cut away the material we want to remove from the boot. Lastly, use the Pipe command (I entered a radius of 2) to make the handles and finish the top edge of our boot.
If you'd like to make some 2D renderings of your boot (or boots if you Mirror it) you can use several different rendering engines available for Rhino 4. Here are some renders made in Vray for Rhino.
Techniques for filleting
There are some basic methods to use when working with fillets (FilletEdge) in Rhino that will make your modeling life a lot easier. The image shown below on the right illustrates how a fillet may look if made incorrectly. The resulting surfaces are not properly trimmed with one another.
In this example we have several edges that we want to round or fillet and they each connect with more then one additional edge. The first basic tip to filleting in Rhino is "don't do twice what you can do once". In other words, fillet all the connecting edges at the same time instead of in batches.
When all the edges are filleted together with one command the result is properly trimmed as shown above.
The second basic tip to filleting in Rhino is "if you have to fillet an edge that intersects an existing fillet give the new fillet a smaller radii". The example above shows two existing fillets at a radius of 1. In order to fillet the remaining edges a lesser value of .7 was used. For advanced tutorials on working with fillets in Rhino be sure to visit the Advanced Filleting page as well as the CommandHelp dialog box in Rhino.
Third Party Plugins
T-Splines for Rhino
T-Splines is a plugin for Rhino 4 that provides another approach to organic modeling when designing in 3D. The T-Splines website lists several work flows that can be used inside of Rhino 4. This is only one of the ways in which T-Splines can be used to quickly model an organic form.
First start with a polygonal object in Rhino. Here I used the MeshBox command to create a bounding box representing the extents of our toothbrush. The second step is to use the tsConvert command making your mesh box become a single T-Splines surface as seen above. To learn more about T-Splines geometry check out this page... what are T-Splines? on their website.
Just like a regular (NURBS) surface in Rhino, you can turn on the control points for a T-Splines surface. The command tsManip can then be used to turn on the T-Splines manipulators which allow for the translation, rotation and scaling of your selection.
Using this select and manipulate work flow a very organic shape can be designed on the fly.
The T-Splines surface has the ability to be turned into a normal Rhino polysurface using the DivideAlongCreases command. The number of isoparms leading up to the star points is determined by the level of smoothness set for them while it was a T-Splines surface.
The T-Splines surface can also be used for rendering purposes... here's a render using the beta of Brazil r/s 2.0 for Rhino
Brazil r/s 2.0 for Rhino (beta version)
The Brazil rendering plugin for Rhino 4 is currently in beta and is available to all interested Rhino users during the development process. The Brazil wiki page has an extensive list of the features and options included. The following example provides one way to use Brazil r/s 2.0 for Rhino and while there are many possibilities when it comes to rendering in Brazil, this method is a simple one in which photo realism can be achieved with minimal effort. Here's the Rhino scene we'll be working with...
You'll need the following files to render this scene yourself...
Download the zip file first and store the "Brazil rendering sample" folder somewhere memorable on your computer, be sure to leave all the files in the same location. The following instructions show how textures, materials and the environment were created for this model... Enjoy!
Make sure the textures have the correct address in relation to where they are stored on your computer... this is an important step. These textures will be added to materials and assigned to the objects in our scene.
HDR images or High Dynamic Range images can be used as both an environment for reflections as well as lighting. This HDR image is a blurred variation of one provided by Paul Debevec .
Selecting the "Material Editor" tab, we can assign the appropriate textures to each of our materials. Right clicking a material tab will allow you to make new textures or change the material type. Regardless of the material type chosen, the basic principle of assigning texture maps to customize materials applies.
There are only a few settings that you'll need to make sure are on in the "Brazil Options" panel and they're shown above. The level of quality for the rendering is controlled in the "Image Sampling" section "P3" being the highest default setting... higher quality = longer waiting time. So if you're playing around with textures keep it on P1 or P2 while you do your test renders. The "Luma Server" section is where you turn on "Global Illumination" for the default "Sky Light" in our scene... this is what makes for soft realistic shadows. That's pretty much it... this is a super simple but relatively fast setup. The size of the rendering produced is set to be the same size as the active viewport but you can change this in the "Output Size" section of the Options panel if you like.
Rhino Labs Projects