First of all thanks Kyle to ask this foundamental question.
I probably have to pile my long list and I’ll do asap but one simple thing that will improve learning experience is PREVIEW and feedback.
Easy would it be to create preview of the result during the construction.
Only extrude has, not on purpose, a preview while creating it.
For example I’m having hard time teaching how to fix the seams in a loft while having the preview of a twisted surface would make the operation self explaining.
A simple request that I posted last week …
““Hi All,
I am teaching a class of students next week, does anyone know if there is a Rhino V8 Keyboard Shortcut Poster ?
Regards,
Mike.””
Keep up the great work …
Mike
I think @schultzeworks made it , but not sure if he shared it
only problem with that is they can all be customized or overwritten…
we can certainly work up some sort of “defaults” cheat sheet- but that goes out the window the second you change one.
I’m teaching maths and physics to interior design students since 6 years and modelling fabrication since three year. I’m a professional architect and working with rhino since V2 when i was a student. Worked with it quite a lot till 2006 and back to it slowly for five years, and quite hard since a pair of years via grasshoper.
In my early years i’ve used rhino mostly to model projects and render them with lighscape. I used to love rhino precision (rhino snaping and positionning is still unmatched for me) and versatility, importing dwg, dxf without problems. Now I use it through grasshopper to modelize sites in conjunction with Qgis and Cloudcompare. I teach students how to get a full site using open data and now switching to fabrication problematics.
I was essentially using rhino to model objects that were subject of problems in mathematics. You can see it as an exercice extension to the nice work done by rajaa with its “essential mathematic”. I think that getting exercices in this domain would be nice, even if not directly related to rhino.
I always wanted to go parametric with grasshoper so students could evaluate and visualize vectors with parametric slider, but never got either time or been assigned the ressources to do it. This part is i think one of the key to go further. When thinking to get something orthogonal to my point of view, understanding the role of the dotproduct is essential. This is just an example but you get the idea.
Leveling up a bit further, the content of architectural geometry should trigger a lot of exercices content or situations found in architecture modelisation process. I don’t talk about basic skills, because with experience i find more valuable to understand the processes than to know wich button to press wich you’ll find anyway if you master the first one.
I personnaly appreciate the pushpull addition by rhino wich is mandatory for young students and myself. Finding exercices or tutorial content for this would be good too, this is a really versatile tool when sketching in 3D and for me one of the killer feature that made sketchup what it is.
I will skip producing an architectural project in rhino as this is not the right tool for the moment, but keep getting an eye on visualARQ. I’m really looking for some content for Rhinolands/Landsdesign 6 wich is suprinsingly mature.
Talking about modelling or fabrication, your video on rhino user webinar are often ressourcefull with the one on morpheus hotel being a jewel. You can easily imagine adding a contextualized exercice on each of those videos. This part is essential to be teached because this is what brings a 3D concept to reality, and often what makes the difference between an image and reality.
To sum up, i think you already have a huge amount of scattered things wich would benefit to be regrouped, structured and further developped in an Academy zone like what prusa did, architectural being one of the scope wich could compose it.
Julien.
I don t want to teach … “but because of a current Bug you have to do…”
Or Bugs that do not let me prepare a lecture, in the way I am used to.
the bad scrolling Behaviour of the command history was one example
or a random delay currently:
There should be more testing / deeper validation before a release is published.
Our IT services are having a hard time installing plug-ins consistently. My course requires some old plug-ins (mostly GH) that need to be installed via folder (GH → Components folder) and some new ones that are available via _PackageManager.
Currently, I install the _PackageManager ones on my machine. Collect them from their install folder, clean up the folder and combine them with the ones from the Components folder to eventually provide the IT services a consistent package for a scripted Powershell install into the user’s Components folders.
What I would wish for: A scripted install possibility for the _PackageManager, similar to Python’s pip install -r requirements.txt.
+1 this! Customizing the interface consistently for students both in the classroom and on their personal computers can be a challenge.
My suggestion is not a single file, but rather a single folder. Just copy the entire settings folder over and replace the original. It contains all the toolbar modifications, interface colors, window layouts etc. If you have a .rui, then you would need to copy that over too.
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\McNeel\Rhinoceros\8.0\settings
The only trick is finding that folder (it’s hidden by default), time to teach your students the trick of %appdata%
However, this does not work on Mac as far as I know.
…that would be: Finder → Shift+Cmd+G (Go to folder)
~/Library/Application Support/McNeel/Rhinoceros/8.0/Settings
Ahh, cool. Does that mean it’s possible now to transfer settings that way from WinRhino to MacRhino and vice-versa?
Thank you for this.
After years of teaching the software both in industrial design and architecture I always laugh at myself because I am self-taught. I do feel like that’s what we all end up doing regardless as we meet new challenges or are presented with particular modeling tasks. It is true, however, that for each field the approach is different.
I like that grasshopper is a nice way to bounce between disciplines simply because it’s there to solve modeling problems and take care of complex operations. When it comes to that matter, the possibility/opportunity to both inspire and empower learners, and make them trust and feel like they can “model whatever they think of” is quite real.
Without detouring into other specific conversations such as the current UI design, but still speaking about UI design:
Long ago I came across a website that featured the Rhinoceros interface. I was quite surprised, never found it again. I think it was in Russian. You were able to hover over icons (buttons) and learn their names - not sure if they were clickable. Although you weren’t able to make actual 3D models through this web interface, it still looked like an instance of the software.
When you look at interactive learning tools and apps these days, many feature interesting platforms that are fun to follow and explore, plus they’re visually oriented. Just top of my head I am thinking of brilliant.org, for example. I am not saying copy this - I’m just saying it’s a different type of self-guided learning in contrast to tutorials and instruction exercises. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing these, however it’s a lot of serious, usually unpaid work when you want to make them nice, digestible, succinct, while showing BIG real-time keystrokes on the screen as you type commands, zoom into or highlight buttons, edit your narration, etc. HOWEVER, if there was a little tiny ‘rhino portal’ (I giggle again because it’s a huge ask, plus I consider the free 90-day trial a pretty sweet what-better-than-that-do-you-need-or-want deal) for learning purposes, where a young learner could go for a rhino lesson, click buttons, learn a command combo for a real operation, and advance in exercise difficulty from there for a specific amount of time until a limit is reached and thus the student inevitably needs more advanced instruction or deliberate self-guided teaching, could be beautiful. Not sure I have seen this with 3D. I know there are web modeling platforms already, so that’s not necessarily the same thing in discussion.
Thanks of the topic!
I had the good fortune of teaching GH + Rhino 7 for graduate and undergraduate level architecture students in both studio and technical courses, it’s a great set of software to be teaching. The combination of the power, flexibility, and relatively intuitive interface makes it the perfect academic one stop shop.
Worth mentioning, one regular source of angst was the need to export line drawings to Illustrator in order to have precise and consistent control over line weights. Rhino doesn’t quite have that nailed down with the consistency required to create a well tuned drawing, so it’s worth spending an extra hour or two on a drawing to get it done. Revit drawings would always have better lineweights (even if they were lacking in other regards).
If you could cut out the illustrator middle man, I expect you’d have tons of very happy teachers out there.
Hey Kyle, thanks for asking this important question. I need to think about it more but some initial feedback…
I like the idea of developing a curriculum for each major field and very much agree that they likely have largely different toolset usage and workflow best practices. I don’t remember all the major markets Bob mentioned in Barcelona, but I tend to deal mostly with Jewelry Design and while I follow the basic format of the Lvl I training guide (I think the general flow is good there) have developed a lot of my own exercises to supplement or replace exercises in the guide. Yes, a lot of work, but you could probably tap into other ARTs to help develop. Consider it a long-term project and I’d definitely be willing to get involved.
Filleting was mentioned a lot above. I know filleting was difficult for me as a self-taught beginner and now I proactively teach proper filleting technique early in my instruction to head off potential problems. Most of my students don’t seem to have problems with it since I started doing that. To that point, maybe the general training guide could be supplemented to address known challenges early on, get ahead of the challenges. I’ll definitely give this more thought and come back with some other ideas.
I meant to add to the above about filleting. Now that we have SubD I mostly use it instead of filleting. Not the filleting will ever become obsolete, but just converting objects with the right quad count to accomplish what you want is the bomb!
Hi Kyle,
I teach Rhino in a School of Art / Design on a regular basis. Most of my students are advanced undergrads and grads. They aren’t going as deep as Architecture / Industrial design students, but they all use Rhino to create designs for digital fabrication (3D printing, CNC milling, cutting, etc)
My go-to template for teaching has been Linked-In learning because their ‘classes’ are so well organized. ‘Learning Rhino 6’ with Chris Reilly is structured really well. (but is quite behind now that Rhino 8 is available)
I really like the model of having tutorial files that students can download to work along with the videos. This way they can practice one operation at a time and re-watch content as needed.
So my first request would be to subdivide content into Chapters, building from ‘getting started’ on up to things like advanced SubD modeling tricks. Then create tutorial files to go along with these lessons where layers can turn on/off the completed elements. (example: to teach how to loft, I find it helpful to have a set of loft curves in a locked layer, then the completed loft shapes in another layer that can be toggled on/off) … (I also include a text layer with instructions and hints for each operation > in the case of the loft a reminder that the order and location of curve selection is critical… experiment with different loft options … and turn on ‘record history’ to edit the loft after it’s been created)
The issue with online tutorials is that it’s hard to be sure the students are putting in the time with them (and the instruction feeling impersonal)… So I have created my own series of tutorial documents which I teach along with in class.
If McNeel created a set of tutorials, videos, and outlines to go along with the videos, I would probably use those! I could teach with the tutorials from the outlines… and students could watch the ‘official’ videos to review / get another perspective.
Another resource I would use is a quiz / test portal to go along with the tutorials. It can be really hard to know how much students are learning / retaining until we start working on projects.
I’m happy to chat more - I have a lot more detailed ideas around how to structure content etc.
Clayton, I 100% agree that a better workflow with line-weight would be great! I could eliminate Adobe Illustrator from my workflow for 90% of our work 
We use Rhino with the laser cutter on a regular basis, and I currently have to move drawings over to illustrator to get and accurate on-screen preview of line weight.
If Rhino 8 had and option to toggle on visibility for line weight settings in the viewports I would use that.
I could see it being added as an option in the ‘Display’ dialog which could be set on a ‘per-mode’ basis. (visible in ‘artistic’ mode but not visible in ‘wireframe’ mode, etc)
Try experimenting with linetypes that have widths in model distances instead of pixels. A 1mm wide linetype should always display as 1mm wide no matter what your zoom level is.
Isn’t this what the printdisplay command does?
Ah, I see. In Object properties if I select Linetype ‘custom’ then I can choose a unit (like Millimeters) and choose a dimension. Is that the setting you are referring to?
I think this is doing what I was hoping to - thanks!
(now I’ll need to play around with sending these to the laser tomorrow - it’s not clear if the Linetype settings are maintained or ignored when printing since there is that separate ‘print width’ drop down)