The need for a new design philosophy behind the Rhino Application
I design yachts. Have done since 1985. I’m reasonably intelligent but I’m not a tech head. I use Rhino every day in my work - on average for 8 to 10 hours a day and have done so since Version 5. But I have neither the inclination nor the free time to go under the hood and check out the technicalities behind the picture that appears in my workspace. I just want to get the work done.
It’s an awesome app and I’m really grateful for it. SubD allowed me to take my work to another level. And the crease function has lifted that work to a whole new level again. Shout out to the engineers, the educators and the support staff. The level of professionalism is inspirational.
But for me the User Interface is just getting way too complicated. So much was going wrong when 'I first started in Rhino 8 that I went back to 7 to get my work done. I studied the Rhino 8 instructions on the user interface but couldn’t figure it out. I figured I just wasn’t smart enough and maybe that’s part of it.
But having dived back into 8 I’m starting to wonder if it’s not just my lack of technical ability that’s holding me back. I currently have several unresolved posts on the Rhino for Mac forum. That’s a tiny fraction of what is on the forum and it must be driving the support engineers nuts.
At one stage I had the icon for the SetView toolbar available in five different locations in menu bars and other containers but none of them would bring up the buttons for the different views.
Is this my lack of understanding or is there actually something faulty in the software? I have no way of knowing and can waste a lot of time poking around to try to find the answer.
I want the great features like Selective Clipping, SubD and Crease Tool- but I don’t need the Swiss army knife of ways to access them. Oh to be able to go back Rhino 7 and take these features along! For me just one button and some sub menus in the top menu bar would be fine.
Is there a Solution to all this complexity?
What about a base level UI that includes all the great tools- but has just one basic way of finding them and setting them up in our workspace so they stayed there?
For the power users who wants more flexibility there would be another level of controls where they could dive in and restructure the UI to suit their own purposes. “Rhino Custom Interface”. Rhino 7 was great. Maybe 8 will be great too but with all of the flexibility in the setup, mixed in with a number of functions that are not working correctly (like disappearing toolbars and constant crashes) it’s just causing a lot of frustration and using up heaps of time that should be used to create great design work.
And please please let’s get Rhino 8 right before we introduce 9.
Watch designer here. I use Rhino professionally since 2005. Made my first steps with it my university in 2001. I believe I started with version 2 or maybe even V1!
I never made much use of UI interface personalization in Rhino, because it is a mess to safe them, keep them, let alone moving them onto a new release.
However, I never had issues moving from one version to next. I often participate in the WIP progress. I believe I used Rhino 4 WIPs for more than a year professionally. That meant new installs every couple of weeks.
My issue was to get used to new UI elements. My issue is to understand and make use of new concepts, such as SubD, but probably that’s because my industry doesn’t use very complex surfaces that often.
Rhino 8 is a massive release, but mostly under the hood. I believe the whole GUI was remade. I am not particularly happy with the way this was done, simply because it keeps the clumsy, icon based approach developed in the 90s. The command line is nice, if you know what you are looking for. However, I can imagine that it is a nightmare for newcomers.
I use Blender and Cinema 4d for rendering and animations. Those programs underwent MAJOR GUI changes throughout the years, to streamline workflows and improve beginner friendliness. I also closely observe the development of Plasticity, it’s insane how one man can implement a parasolid kernel and build a full direct modeling GUI around it!
Even Alias is making its GUI better and better.
In Rhino the GUI can be adapted to your personal workflow. You could a ribbon menu with all your tools needed throughout a workday and the pop up menu for your 10-20 go-to tools. That’s how I have it set up. So the solution to your problem is already built into Rhino, but it’s overly complicated and inaccessible.
Therefore, I would support your claim! Rhino needs to rethink its GUI and approaches to that topic
I had a brief taste of how the User Interface in Rhino is supposed to work after doing a reset and rebooting my computer. I would like to take back everything I said in that top post. I would like to delete it. If we can get the bugs fixed the setup is great.
I’m beginning to wonder if my computer is the problem. The reason I say that is because the reset and restarting Rhino did not fix the problems but restarting the computer did- if only briefly.
Could this be a faulty memory problem?
Here are the outstanding issues I have currently in various posts.
Copy and paste is not working - at least not consistently.
Copy object to layer not working.
Turn on Points OK in Drop Down Menu bar but not working as key command or command Line entry. F10 does not work for points on- but never worked in previous versions- but I think this a keyboard setup issue for the MacOS.
Gumball has to be reset on a regular basis
Transparency in Materials not working (but seems to be OK for other users).
The soft crease setting in SubD does not transfer with a copy and Paste or export and import.
Regular Lockups and Red Screens (not crashes). Not reported as Not Responding but have to restart anyway.
None of these issues are occurring in Rhino 7. Maybe Rhino8 requires a lot more memory?
Apple macOS Version 13.6.7 (Build 22G720) (Physical RAM: 32GB)
Mac Model Identifier: iMac18,3
Language: en-TH (MacOS default)
.NET 7.0.0
Metal GPU Family Apple 0
Metal GPU Family Common 3
Metal GPU Family Mac 2
Graphics processors
Radeon Pro 580 (8 GB)
iMac (2560 x 1440)
USB devices
Western Digital: My Passport 25E2
Wacom Co.,Ltd.: Intuos5 touch M
Broadcom Corp.: Bluetooth USB Host Controller
Apple Inc.: FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in)
Apple Inc.: Magic Keyboard
Sony: WALKMAN
Bluetooth devices
None
Third party kernel extensions
com.paragon-software.filesystems.ntfs (840.11.15) 9E8D6170-3CAB-36CA-843A-F0A289351281
This is definitely a setup issue. In macOS by default F-keys are used to change volume and so. You need to hold down the fn-key to use F10 for example. Of course, you can change this behavior in the macOS settings: How to use the function keys on your Mac - Apple Support
