Grid system in Rhino

Here are some of my thoughts about the current grid system.

  • We can’t have something like an infinite grid - we can set it to be big, but it is very performance heavy.

  • Rhino has too few grid line types (only 2) and It’s difficult to set it up, the way it will be helpful no matter how close or far you are zoomed.

If you zoom very close: you may not have enough grid cells

if you zoom out: minor grid cells will be useless but still rendered and provide noticeable viewport performance drop, major grid cells at this time still can be too small or too big.

  • There are some angles and distances from the camera in which some of the grid lines brings more problems than benefits. I think that smart independent falloff for different grid lines is a very elegant solution to this problem.

  • More types of grid lines bring a better feel of scale from every zoom level.

Most of that came to my mind when I saw a grid system in the newest Blender. Take a look.

Blender


Rhino

BLENDER

close


medium

far

RHINO

close


medium

far

5 Likes

I don’t think it is fair to compare performance between Blender and Rhino considering the type of objects and size of objects that are created in each of them, but I support the suggestion that the grid system needs to be changed significantly.

On professional perspective: in shipbuilding standard unit is mm but the size of the model may go over 300 meters. You get grid only 100x100 mm :slight_smile: you can see the problem right there.

1 Like

Sometimes I work with the urban scale, and sometimes furniture.
When working in urban scale I would still like to have divisions as small as 10 cm or 1 cm when I zoom in, but after zooming out I don’t need my viewport to be bloated with that fine division cells.
I think there should be more customization options in grids, and some “infinite division” implemented.

This is a completely different example and in 2D only but you can see this idea.

One may not need it and be fine with the actual grid system but others may benefit from making it more flexible.

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Hello - there is an ancient wish along these lines (dynamic grid) - I’ve added a link to your comment-

https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-12039

-Pascal

Hi Pascal,
Unfortunately, your link shows “404 not found” for me.

1 Like

Hi,
What I find super useful is changing the grid scale with a shortcut. I have ctrl+1 for making it smaller and ctrl+2 to make it larger. Maybe you coud implement this? It will work well with dynamic grid display.

2 Likes

Nice idea @Bogdan_Chipara

I created scripts for working in mm:
it increases gridspace from 0.1 to 0.5 to 1 then 10 then 100 (maximum)
it decreases from 100 to 10 to 1 then 0.5 and 0.1 (minimum)

and reports back the gridspace in mm

decreaseGridSpacing.py (746 Bytes)
defaultGridSpacing.py (311 Bytes)
increaseGridSpacing.py (746 Bytes)

3 Likes

Nice! I double the space or cut it in half.
I want this in R7, without scripts :smiley:

Pascal

The link is broken

image

Hello - thanks, try now…?

-Pascal

Thats better

I want it smarter in R7 :wink: Thick and thin lines. Possibility to extend the grid to the extents of the model, dynamically.

I also want circular and triangular grid.

1 Like

A wish for a radial grid was already on the list (RH-1515) - I’ve added the triangular wish on the same item…

2 Likes

Could you please add also rectangular grid. Because in architecture it is common to have a grid size on one direction and another on the other direction. So rearanging walls for example becomes more easy on a rectangular grid.

Thank you!

1 Like

We have that one on the pile a few times already.
I added your request to the oldest occurrence thereof that I could find: RH-1541.

1 Like

Great, thanks!

Bumping a thread after some time, maybe for the V9?
Performance issues, Moire pattern, and generally uselessness of the grid in the far zoom out.
Blender does a good job with the grid fade away.

Not performant, not looking good, not helpful.

VisualARQ has a dynamic scale bar for the orthogonal views if the dynamic grid is the issue when dealing with a sense of size.

1 Like