Automating rhino customization

Rhino
1

Hi,

I am the cofounder of Teakomatic.com, and I’m happy to say we’re training! I would like a way to get my trainees and team a standard copy of our team rhino environment, including our custom macros, toolbars, aliases, and scripts. I also want to keep everyone up to date!

We currently install 4 components:

  1. Rhino Settings: deploy options.ini
  2. Python Scripts: update python search path + deploy our python scripts
  3. Toolbars: install our toolbar + replace the rhino toolbar
  4. Aliases: install aliases.txt

Current Status

Today I maintain a setup and update entry in our procedure manual. Users download the latest files and perform the setup and update tasks for each of the four tasks above.

It’s not always as reliable as it could be, and if that sounds a little terrifying… it is.

Questions:

  1. Should we work to eliminate manual installation and update altogether?

    • Does anyone recommend it?
    • How did you accomplish it?
    • Did it help align the team on the same versions and settings?
      - Did people fight it?

  2. What is the easiest way to do this, technically?

    • Can we do the install in a macro?

      • AFAIK macros cannot check updates, download files, or set toolbar layout

    • We could run a python update script at startup; is this as reliable as a plugin’s update mechanism?

    • Does maintaining a full plugin make this task easier than the python route?

Thanks for the help!

Yours Truly,
Seeking Automation

3

I think, possibly, @DanBayn may have done at least some of this for his organization - he might have a thought or two.

-Pascal

4

Hi Max,

Feel free to contact me with any questions. We have about 180 Rhino users across all of our facilities and all of the installs start out identical. I use a batch file (script) to pull this off.