I’ve read on this forum that Rhino doesn’t like nested blocks? Is that true? And if it is can you still get away with on level of nesting?
Right now I use groups instead of nested blocks. It does start to cause lag at a point, so I’m wondering which is the lesser evil.
Generally I can get away with one layer of nested blocks I don’t think I’d go deeper than that, but I would have a lot of nested blocks.
Have to bump this one sorry! It’s one hurdle stopping me from establishing my workflow standards.
Blocks are definitely the way to go if you want to include more than one identical collection of geometry in your model. Increased performance and more convenient. As far as multiple layers of nesting is concerned, why not try it for yourself? I believe McNeel has made a number of improvements in this area in the version 9 beta. I personally use the great BlockEditNew plugin which makes nested blocks a breeze.
Can you get us a model to benchmark? We have been building up a test bench of large performance files. We would like to add yours to the test.
I’ll get you something if it helps but it will be a mess. I will definitely have a cleaner example in the coming weeks as well.
A mess is totally fine. Appreciate the files.
in rhino9 they implemented groups inside of blocks - although its a little messy with the plugin blockeditnew (hopefully it will get fixed at some point) - this could maybe make your workflow work as a hybrid: blocks with groups inside for organisation.
I’m trying to think of the smartest way to do this. I could take a small project, make two copies: One where I explode all the blocks and group the geometry instead, then one where I nest a few levels of blocks.
File size means I don’t think I’ll email. I forget which email you guys always tell people to send their files to (I just have to wait for Rhino to crash… but it’s been really good lately haha).
Here is the link to upload larger files: https://www.rhino3d.com/upload
Send it all together, with the blocks. When we benchmark with all be running a bunch of tests on it including exploding it.
You may want to take a look at this thread and see if it will help:
I will thank-you!!
I haven’t forgot about this - I’ve got a few projects picked out my worry is that they don’t serve as the best test subjects. I may upload them regardless. One is 600mb though… maybe I should pass on that one. Long story short I think I’m going to ponder over the weekend… maybe I can make something more decisive that’s closer to a real-world representation of a potential performance draw.
The main thing(s) I’m most likely to group are annotations in layout space. And potentially larger assemblies in model space.
To be honest I really need to consider R9. How close is it to its actual release? I know you guys probably hate being asked that haha!!
We do a soft release to prevent people buying Rhino 8 right before the release, the buy Rhino pages turn into Rhino 9 around a month before the official announcement. Currently we are still selling Rhino 8. Check the buy page once a week. Rhino 8 was released in Oct 2023 and its about a 3 yr release cycle…
I’m confused… Groups can’t be nested, so why are you comparing them?
We’ve made some pretty massive improvements in performance in v9. Hopefully enough so that you don’t need to care about deciding to use groups or blocks for performance purposes. Several models in our internal testing suite are around 300% faster on v9 with Direct3d.
If you don’t have time to test 9, please send me a 3dm. I’ll test it out and see if any other optimizations could be made based on what’s in the file.