Ive been gently working my way towards this while trying to wrap my head around all of the relevant features Rhino currently has. In AutoCAD, I have a set of toolbars linked to a single .dwg drawing, which I refer to as our Key drawing. In it, I have all of our typical layers and properties. By referencing this source drawing, it ensures consistency between drawings and projects.
The structure of the toolbar is broken down into two levels: Parent (Called Groups in ACAD, similar to Tabs in Rhino) and Child (Refered to as Toolbars in each). My dream would be to be able to populate each of these for both programs from a single CSV file. My instinct is that the likelihood of achieving that is pretty slim.
In ACAD, developing these toolbars is quite easy. I click create a new toolbar, name it, then drag and drop items onto it. Admittedly, doing this with a 2d program is far less nuanced than it would be for Rhino, and my aim is even higher here. A toolbar called Pipe there would contain a bunch of section views of different sizes, materials, and wall thicknesses of pipe. Whereas in Rhino, my equivalent is a macro for each that looks like this (!-_Layer New “0 Pipe 1.250in sch 40” R “0 Pipe 1.250in sch 40” 159,127,255 _-Layer Current “0 Pipe 1.250in sch 40” Enter Pipe Thick=yes 17.52 21.08 Enter Enter Enter) Creating a new layer with the proper name, setting the layer color by RGB, then generating the pipe to the appropriate dimensions. I currently have about 70 round pipe and tube layers. This is a lot of macros to create and maintain, and is only a portion of around 350 layer standards we currently have. I often open the Key.dwg file with Rhino and just copy items I want into the new drawing, but would love to see a cleaner, faster workflow. My current workflow utilizes buttons at the top of my screen to toggle panels containing toolbars relevant to different tasks, but I am still evaluating what the final product should look like. For example, I have a Pipe Tools Panel that has three tabs so far. One tab to create the pipe and pipe layer, one tab to fillet pipe center lines with a prefilled center line radius that matches each of the dies we have available for each size of pipe, and another to fillet pipe center lines with a prefilled center line radius that matches each of the pre-purchased elbows we commonly use.
I apologize for the lack of conciseness in this post, as the topic is quite a large area to consider, and I am not sure what the best approach is (my dream vs what is reasonably achievable). I guess as of now, my hope would be a way to import macros from a .csv file. One could fill the first page of the spreadsheet with the full list of standard layers and their properties, and then use the following sheets to generate macros referencing the standard layer sheet.
Does this seem like something that could be achieved, or am I off in dreamland? I am open to any and all serious recommendations on more efficient ways of utilizing layer standards or generating macros, but am looking for a somewhat elegant solution that does not feel clunky to use.