Floorplans with furniture, dynamic blocks in rhino?

Hello everyone,

I am wondering how to create floor plans in my architecture studies using just Rhino.

Rhino unfortunately don’t support dynamic blocks like autocad.

Now I spend so much time with line drawing furniture in the houses like sofas, kitchens, bathrooms.

I would like to ask you, how can I create floorplans full of furniture?

Is best way to draw furniture in 2D with the most simplest forms of grouped lines?
Or do you use some simple 3D objects? If yes,do you know about some good and huge libraries?
Or is there any way how to use dynamic blocks from autocad in Rhino?

Thank you for your options. Probably everyone will have diferen’t workflow. So what should be most effective? I spend so much time with those finishing details due to not very friendly editing as with dynamic blocks.

Vasek

I use Revit now, but I used AutoCAD for over 20 years prior. I’ve often wondered how to get Rhino to behave like AutoCAD. I’m curious about the furniture blocks that are dynamic. Most of the dynamic blocks we used in AutoCAD were for things like section marks or annotative callouts that we could place and then alter. The furniture blocks were mostly static. With Rhino able to import DWG files, most AutoCAD furniture blocks could be used directly. For Revit, we pull a lot of 3d furniture from bimobject.com. Many of the manufacturers also supply 2d AutoCAD files there as well.

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I’ve been struggling with the same things - but more so the lack of models part and having to model every little detail. I do also miss Dynamic Blocks as they were a key part of my AutoCAD productivity. I’ve been somewhat successful using groups to replace my dynamic annotation blocks in AutoCAD.

I’m using two different approaches in Rhino. One is to try and make things “modular” and the second is making things “stretchable” and “scalable”. Rhino geometry is almost ‘dynamic’ in some ways. If you learn to exploit that you can make up some time.

I’m in the stages of planning some way to create a model library. I want to start with a furniture set that will fill out a condo nicely and give us a way to get 3D plans (for real estate brochures) together in a reasonable amount of time. Rhino would be great at that if we had all our stuff ready to go. But without it… we’re SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW.

I remember being a student and having to build AutoCAD standards while I did a project, and running out of time… I feel the pain and agony again!! It’s amazing that programs like AutoCAD and Revit don’t come with better built-in templates (especially Revit). Rhino’s used for so much stuff that I don’t really think it’s practical to include templates beyond what they do… but I have seen demand for some sort of custom template + asset pack.

PS: If you make a list of what you need I’ll post stuff that might be helpful. Some of my models are okay… others are pretty gnarly.

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FWIW, there’s the ancient (and unvetted but free) 2D symbols library with 3000+ symbols.
If you need 3D and are willing to pay, there’s SAVANNA3D R7 | Rhino3D.Education
-wim

The 2D library what you send is useless for architecture studies. I will try Savana and let you know my feetback.

There’s a few catches with Savanna. I’ve purchased it. The longer I’ve had it the more disappointed I’ve been. When I first downloaded it I merely browsed through it and most the models looked really good. But I find when there’s something I actually need I get let down. I’ll show a specific example below, but first I’ll outline the issues I’ve had/potential improvements if they do decide to fix it up:

  1. Organization could be a little better. For example, if you want to assemble a range you’ll have to dig through two separate folders. Some of the models for R6 didn’t make it into R7. I don’t want to really go after the organization too hard but there’s a lot of good models that people are never going to find.

  2. Model quality is highly variable. Some could easily look like they should in a photo-realistic render, others you can barely tell what it is, or it looks like it came out of “The Sims”.

  3. Lots of the furniture is exotic, strange, or just unrealistic. Sometimes finding a common simple piece of furniture is next to impossible. I’m looking at the toilets while writing this and… ya… no…

  4. Some of the models needed to be finished off/fixed in various ways. Sometimes it’s not hard but other times it’s just easy to create your own model(s).

The door would be easy to fix but this is just an example of what to expect (it’s not that bad it’s just an example I know of off-hand):

The model itself… it’s not that bad. It’s simple and looks the part. Dimensionally it’s not quite true to life (it seems like the door opening itself is the rough opening dimensions, but I might be wrong). The door knob is floating, no biggie. There are also surfaces floating around inside of the thing. I changed the color on the opposite door panel face so you can see that the door panel is not a solid.

Doors only take mere minutes to model (or fix, this one looks just fine), and honestly I think people are going to want their own styles of doors anyways - I have my way of modeling doors. But for so much other stuff it’s the same or a similar story (I was going to show a toilet but this post is getting too long).

What I realized is that multiple people are going through this process. If you have 100 customers and you can save them all an hour just by putting in a few hours of work, that’s 100 hours saved (minus the time you put in). If you ask every customer to each, individually, spend a few hours… well… the economics of that just doesn’t work out, hence why barely anyone uses this stuff.

I know I probably could have created a few things while putting this post together but I don’t know I really needed to share/get that out.

Thank you for letting me know all your important experiences! You saved me some money and a lot of time. I would try to use something what doesn´t work as I will expect.

It sounds like Rhino has NO good library of furniture which we can use for our architecture studies. Doesn´t matter if they are in 2D or 3D.
It is really sad. Because this is basic request what we need for our architecture work in this software. And it could save us lot of time.
I would be enought if the library will be created just from basic volumes or from basic 2D marks.

Thanks a lot for your feedback, I will pass this to the people that model these blocks… Hope they can review them…

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