I’m curious to learn more about studios that use Rhino as their primary tool, not only for design, but also for documentation.
After working in architecture and design studios in three different countries, I’ve seen several different workflows involving Rhino. In many cases, Rhino is used mainly during the ideation phase, and then either translated into BIM software (such as Archicad) or completely remodeled there for documentation.
I’m interested in studios that instead keep the project in Rhino throughout the process — from concept development to drawing production.
I’m currently using this workflow for an interior project in New York, and I’ve found it to be a very fluid and intuitive way to work. While I recognize the advantages of BIM software, I personally enjoy Rhino’s interface and flexibility and would love to continue developing projects primarily within this environment.
If you know of any architecture or design studios that work this way, I would be very grateful to hear about them.
And if you personally use Rhino for both modeling and documentation, I’d love to learn more about your experience and how your workflow is structured.
this is mostly a rant.. so take it with a grain of salt as to how useful that is
i was in a team working on interior reconstruction projects up to 3000 m². for ideation, planning and documentation i used WIP 6 because it had a very useable rendered view that helped quickly pump out situations. and while i dont think that you need much BIM for interior projects, Rhino only could definitely work.. though if you need it anyway you could use Visual Arq for Rhino for Windows (no Mac version unfortunately)
but Rhino has become quite a burden with its quirks and some stuff that was never good, got worse. for instance since V6 Rhino handles fonts completely different and a major bug that never got fixed was introduced.
for one of the projects i had to design decorative guiding system inside Philip Morris in Vienna, and their own proprietary font did not work in Rhino at least not all the styles, some styles are just ignored, so i had to do all the font related stuff else where and import the curves back into Rhino to complete communication material, which was really painful. the worst is that it was never fixed. many popular industry standard fonts do not work properly, there are several topics on this issue but it has been ignored and ghosted, which is just jaw droppingly strange to me.
so if you want to rely on full blown documentation and you have specific fonts you need that do not work you might have to add some other packages. other than that Rhino alone can work if you really want to.
Awesome! I’ve been looking to transition out of Archicad 'cause of their pricing model (it’s going to be subscription now after 2026) and am looking to just solely use Rhino as my main design and documentation tool.
I’m a solo practice so the less (but right) tools is my strategy for everything right now.
Any chance you can share some of your project files? Especially the mixed-use ones and multi-family ones.
Totally get it if you’re tied up by NDAs and what not.
ok the other also 
so you dare bash any of these 