Rhino

From PDWiki

Rhinoceros 3D is a stand-alone, commercial NURBS-based modeling tool, originally developed by Robert McNeel & Associates as a plug-in for Autodesk's AutoCAD. The software is commonly used for Industrial Design, architecture, Marine design, Jewelry design, CAD / CAM, rapid prototyping, reverse engineering as well as the multimedia and graphic design industries.

Rhino 3D specializes mainly in free-form NURBS modeling. There are several major add-ons available for the program, also developed by Robert McNeel & Associates, including Flamingo (a raytracing rendering plugin), Penguin (non-photorealistic rendering), and Bongo (animation) . Penguin is also available for AutoCAD. There are also hundreds of third-party plug-ins available.

One of the interesting aspects of the program, and reasons for widespread use among many industries, is the vast import and export options within the program. The import and export options allow for Rhino to act as a 'converter' tool which often allows other programs to communicate with each other.

Rhino 3D is becoming increasingly popular amongst many different industries because of its diversity, multi-disciplinary functions, and relatively low cost.

The Rhino 3D program was originally distributed as an open Beta. Many, many users downloaded it for free and began using it. The software developed a broad community of users whose usage debugged and added features to the program. One of the primary attractive features of the software is its user interface. It is quite intuitive, especially when compared to AutoCAD. It makes great use of the mouse. Right clicking brings up alternates to most of the functions. The mouse wheel will interactively zoom and clicking it will pop other subwindows with additional feature sets. Free trial versions are still available for download from their website here. The development is on-going, version 3.0 is current. The last build was released on May 19, 2006, Service release 5B. Version 4.0 is coming soon.

Rhino Script

Rhino script is a plug-in for Rhino that implements VBScript. Scripting allows the user to access and control the program from its most robust, seemingly abstract level. RhinoScript is based on the Visual Basic programming language, by using methods that are Rhino specific, a script that is generated and runs inside Rhino is an RVB file, or RhinoVisualBasic. The possiblities of RhinoScript is potentially infinate, where the user is able to string together a series of actions and calculations in very little time, harnessing the power of the computer to perform large levels of computation to generate, analyse, rationalize, or simplify geometry. There is much debate in the current architectural discourse regarding the ligitamacy of these methods; at Penn we are also indulging in this conversation and hopefully you can judge for yourself the value of scripting in design.