I am thinking about some system or simpler/efficient way of organising things in rhino. we have layers that serves the purpose well. but i find some limitations that the Tag system can eliminate. the tag system is just like using hashtags in the current digital or social world (the inspiration comes from telegram which handles large amount of unorganised data with the help of hashtags).
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Any object can be the member of only one layer or sublayer. which serves the 90-95% usecase. but lets say we want to select all furnitures of the projects that are either on Ground, first or any floor then we have to expand each floor layer and select the sub-layer furniture. now if the user add any additional floor and copy furniture from previous floor that removes all the previous information of the object but with tag system it is preserved.
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Once the layers cross 30 or 40, it becomes the hassle of scrolling and expanding of layers even to select layer objects. but with the help of tags we can select/deselect in any manner. It completely replace the selection panel which 90% of the people not used to.
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Rhino is currently working on things called rhino.inside so there can be an automated system of assigning tags to objects created from other softwares like revit, etabs or any other. it will be very helpful to automatically assign tags to imported Autocad data which otherwise is very painful to manage.
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Layers are not flexible when you work with teams specially when they have different background and maybe using another software.
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when the data becomes big, it becomes hard to manage. however, we can create and assign layers but that need dedicated time and even after we have 100+ layers and sub-layers that we sometimes struggle to give name. also after doing that work we have to scroll and expand the sub-layers each time to select objects.
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The data organized by Tags can be helpful not only for the person working on but to anyone he shares his file. we can also search for specific models online using tags. like lets say we assign tag to our object as Furniture, wooden then we can replace it with available models with similar tags even we can just create cube and assign tag and replace it with available online library of rhino models. after importing and tweaking it to our liking we can submit our model back to library so other users can find variety to the same model.
once we assign the tags we can used them to create TagGroups
TagGroups can be used to select objects and if there is not any technical issue we can use standard layer function like on/off, lock and others. we can have commands like âTagGrouptoLayersâ to quickly make layers.
maybe rhino can auto-assign tags like while importing models from autocad or other software.
This seems streamline and contemporary workflow which even can replace layer system. i think all BIM software have something similar function managed internally by software but Rhino can make it available directly to the user so he can use whatever way he like to use it. i see itâs use mainly for organising and hiding unnecessary objects. It can be combined with layouts to have very specifically workflow inside layout.
no disrespect intended.