Hi Mahek,
Apologies if this is a long read, maybe some of it will help, maybe not.
I studied interior architecture & design and worked as an interior designer for almost 10 years before even touching Rhino & Grasshopper. We primarily used Revit, SketchUp, and AutoCAD.
While I haven’t regretted investing most of my time in those programs as they fit the needs at the time, now that I’ve been more focused in Rhino & Grasshopper I see many ways I could have used it sooner to our benefit.
I found the best way to learn a program was to start working on a project with a goal in mind like (I want to create a small house on a hill, or do a vignette study of an interior living room in Sweden, or design a lawyer’s office in Manhattan) keeping the goals open ended but detailed enough to allow guidance when you get stuck. Ideally, you pick something you are passionate about even if its something like your own house or dream house or for a friend you are close with but do give yourself some hardline parameters like “~2000 sq ft or less, large windows with views to landscape”.
Then have reference material handy for when questions inevitably turn up (the forum search bar here, google, potentially chatGPT in some cases, and colleagues) will be a wealth of information for you.
Finally, just get in there and start creating and give yourself patience and grace when you come across road blocks and most importantly give yourself time and allow the curiosity to explore different solutions to those roadblocks so that you can learn from them. Immersion & being hands on, like learning language, is (in my opinion) is the key to learning Rhino/GH or any program for that matter.
Longer Read Below:
In hospitality design I was always creating new 3D models of custom light fixtures, furniture pieces, small accessories, you name it. Lots of layers and details at a per object level of detail. (summary: custom)
In commercial design more of my time was focused in adapting 3D models received from manufacturers and either updating them to be parametric for reuse later or just getting them into the program as is and making sure they read well in visualizations AND documentation. (summary: conversion)
There’s a lot of potential layers in interior design, sometimes you have a single room you are working in but the context around you is a whole building and perhaps a whole site, landscape, or cityscape outside of that and you can get down granularly to a tiny detail or paint a larger, less detailed picture.
Some 3D/Rhino Interior Design Related Tips To Keep In Mind As You Go:
-get a good understanding of axis/origin of components/geometry (be consistent), for example I like to put the axis of a chair at the bottom center of its bounding box but I like to put the axis of a wall sconce at the actual point where it attached to a wall or for a ceiling pendant, the axis I like to put at the attachment point at the top of the model where it connects to the ceiling. This allows easier snapping/positioning based on the intended use case.
-get a good understanding of blocks/components and instances of said blocks. you may work on a ballroom with 500 of the same chair and 50 of the same tables. You want to only model that table and chair once and then just array it. but you want to nest that table and chair set so that if you modify one it updates all of them in the ballroom. Then you can leverage GH to “jiggle” the position/rotation of the chairs slightly to create a more natural/realistic rendering (if desired) as most times furniture placement is never perfect perfect in photographs/real world.
-work in a local context but keep the larger context in mind. if you have a single floor of an office tower you may need to have that whole floor turned on in your software but that doesnt mean you need the whole tower, be smart about showing what you need to show when you need to show it. this will help with computation time, ease of navigating the model, and speed of saving/processing everything. if you were given a model that has a “world origin” you should probably keep that world origin or at very least understand how your rhino model is located in response to that original file. Meaning if you you get a site model or large building model but are only working on a small room, ideally your small room is near the world origin in Rhino to make it easy to work with but if you were to copy/paste it into the original file it should line up exactly in place of where it is in the larger context or vice versa.
-experiment with material creation/manipulation. in interior design you use, even on a simple project, quite a few materials. having accurate representation of these materials or accurate data helps simplify the process downstream both in documentation/specification and in visualization (if you go that route). As an example: I always map textures to their real world size. If it’s a 2" x 6" subway tile, if I make a new rendering texture I may make it 15 rows by 5 columns of tile. This allows me to create a 2K (2048x2048) or 4K (4096x4096) (usually 4k is overkill in rendering interiors) texture that is a square format while ensuring I’m using real world dimensions related to the pixel dimensions. In other words I know that if I have 15 rows at 2" tall that would mean it is 30" tall for the overall texture and 30" in width as well. Now I can map that texture to geometry or apply in rendering space at a real world scale. This applies for all textures with the exception of maybe leather where sometimes you need to “cheat” to make it easier to see by upsizing it perhaps.
-in interiors you also repeat things a lot like furniture groupings for instance. while you may never use the same two chairs across projects, i bet you come across a lounge grouping or a dining table grouping or a conference table grouping a LOT across different projects. this is a good example of where block instances or a GH script could go a long way. Like if you use a script to generate different furniture groups at certain points in your rhino model and spawn in generic furniture blocks at those locations, you can swap those blocks for the exact furniture you want when you get to the point of deciding that and you can leverage user input to parametrically adjust things like chair count, spacing, random rotation, etc… another example is a parametric downlight where you can adjust the diameter, recessed vs surface mounted. This is a component that you have the potential to use ALOT.
-long story short, use GH for scripts that will automate the tedium/repetition of interior design, freeing yourself up for the actual design part.
-use Rhino to model/iterate, explore, and present your designs
-use Rhino or a third party renderer to visualize your designs with more detail (if needed)
-hand sketch over top of your 3D design view exports, hybridization of mediums or the touch of a human hand can go a long way sometimes
overall, keep it loose, keep it fun, and be open to following your curiosities and challenging yourself to new ideas and solutions while giving yourself grace and patience when you get frustrated with the journey.
it’s rewarding but like anything, it does take hard work and dedication.
I wish you all the best in your journey and career and these forums are a great sounding board as you come across issues in your projects.
Cheers!
