Onboarding to new users, some dead links and some very outdated. Why?

Rhino Rhino for Windows
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Hi McNeel,

we are hiring a new junior industrial designer, and as you might already know here in the US is common for industrial designers to have no Rhino experience in school, and even in professional settings if they work in commodity design studios. Many schools and employers teach/use only Solidworks and Fusion 360. They are great tools if all you do is simple stuff, but they are simple tools if you are trying to do great stuff. So sometimes we find good designers, who have much more basic surfacing know-how than what we/they need, in both Nurbs and SubD, and we have to get them up to speed to create goodness in CAD.

Today I added one of these new users to our Rhino licenses and wanted to send her some starting point tutorials before we move into our advanced training, and I was a bit surprised by how little care is being put into new user onboarding.

Let me show you:

  1. Going to Help > Learn Rhino > Tutorials and Samples, shows the olde v6 training guide.

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  1. Going to Help > Learn Rhino > Tutorials on the web shows this:
    capture_gf_125438PM_210215
    capture_gf_125438PM_2102151035×966 69.5 KB

then searching here I’ve found that there’s a better web link: Rhino - Learn to use Rhino unfortunately it is showing a lot of very old stuff still, even as the very first hits on the page:

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It sounds to me like you guys don’t need to do better since you are probably selling way too many licenses every day to even worry about any this, but I need you to do better to help me get new people onboarded more successfully.

Can you please update the dead links, and hurry up on updating those training guides? V7 was released last year, it’s time.

Thx for listening!

Gustavo

3 Likes
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Dunno, I would never think to use the link inside Rhino for that, I always direct questions to the main site under “Learn”… all the stuff is there.

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Hi Mitch,

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I would never consider what you or anyone closely related to McNeel do, as a relevant input for this issue.

All Adobe CC apps, Substance, Fusion, Modo, Blender, Camtasia, Concepts, Sketchbook, even Office apps have help right into the app.

Also even if someone completely new to Rhino thinks of going to a website they would end up here:

This should be fixed, nurtured, kept updated. At least please put Kyle’s latest videos as the first hits, since they are modern, based on the current version, and pretty good.

Thx,

G

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Which papers / tutorials / links / would be the top five for beginners to read and follow in order to become self-going with Rhino?

Also, I was thinking of translating them to my native language, so only the best sources for a top five list is of interest, to begin with.

// Rolf

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Fine, you’re entitled to your opinion of course. If you extrapolate the ‘closely related’ further, nobody from McNeel will have any ‘relevant input’ on this issue for you either then.

I agree 100% the dead links should be fixed. The fact that this has not happened yet however is an indication that almost nobody uses them, or this would have been remarked about here long ago. It appears principally that the “Tutorials on the Web” is 404 because the Rhino main site got re-arranged for V7.

@KelvinC - I filed a youtrack bug report here : https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-62814

There is the fact that the User Guide and Level 1 and 2 are still on V6 - yes, I agree they are often a year or more behind the release. Probably related to McNeel’s preoccupation with getting the software out to the users as soon as they can, even if the support material isn’t ready yet.

Your labels “8 years ago, V6” are of course incorrect, as V6 is not 8 years old - only 3. And the ‘interface basics’ have not changed all that much since V6, so nobody is going to be really lost. SubD is of course what’s missing from all of that stuff.

Oh, c’mon Gustavo, coming from a person as sharp as you, this kind of response is disappointing.

The first instinct of almost everyone I know is to G-search whatever question they have. For Photoshop, for example, I don’t think I have ever opened the Help menu…

And I guess ‘the algorithm’ knows me all too well, because when I G-search ‘Rhino’ I get this on the first page:

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DuckDuckGo search - same thing. OK, maybe it knows me too, although I never use it.

I even tried on my wife’s Mac - she doesn’t use Rhino, never has, nothing installed on her computer that is related to Rhino - and Safari still came up with it at the top of the first page. All that just to say - it ain’t hard to find if you search in good faith.

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I love you Mitch.

G

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I created separate YT issues for the developers to fix the problems. Thanks.