Faster UI Workflow — Customize Rhino Buttons

[AlanMattano (Soaring Stars lab)]

Rhino Tip: Flip Surface Normals Faster with a Custom Button Setup

Some Rhino colleagues asked me to share tips and tricks for faster modeling.
Here’s a small customization that really helps: I modified the default Analyze Direction button.

By swapping its default actions, I assigned:

• Left Mouse Button (LMB): _Flip (Flip Direction)

• Right Mouse Button (RMB): _Dir (Analyze Direction)

This setup allows you to select and flip in two clicks using the same RMB, making the process noticeably faster and smoother.

It’s a simple tweak, but it saves a lot of clicks when checking and fixing surface normals.

[AlanMattano (Soaring Stars lab)]

Incremental Save

As a second tip, I modified the “Incremental Save” button by adding: ! _SaveSmall

In this way, you are saving smaller backups. And it is a sort of non-destructive way to work.

[AlanMattano (Soaring Stars lab)]

How to organize your projects and folders

This is my personal project library.

I use a simple system: every project begins with the prefix AM, followed by the year and a sequential number (e.g., AM25xx) after that comes the project title.

This structure lets me track hundreds of ideas across design, simulation, modeling, and research, while keeping everything intuitive, searchable, visible, and clean.

Within each one, you can find the files organized into each specific file format folders.

[AlanMattano (Soaring Stars lab)]

Hardware Setup Suggestion

I use two 4K TVs each. One vertically.

The TV is curved vertically. The QLED is 120Hz and 55 inches (60 inches better). This allows me to spend more hours working on the project without problems, without worrying about 4K resolution or getting a headache (usually caused by the low 60Hz refresh rate).

[AlanMattano (Soaring Stars lab)]

Tip & Trick: Isolation + History in Rhino

In this short lesson, I show how both features work together to create a cleaner, faster modeling workflow.

Tip and trick using history and isolation