Hey everyone,
As a product design engineer, I’ve always used other programs to 3D model injection molded plastic parts, die cast aluminum parts, wooden parts, and the final assemblies using them.
Very curious about using Rhino for that, and what real-life products have been made from Rhino models.
Can we start a thread here showing photographs of real-life finished products that were designed in Rhino?
Very nice job of surfacing (and building) of the hull with the black topsides. Reflections show a very smooth and fair shape.
Thanks David,
That was molded in a three piece ‘direct to female’ CNC tooled mold made by Precision Shapes of Virginia. The mold itself looked flawless and when the hull came out it was looked at very carefully by Bob Perry and I and seemed very fair. The hull got some local fairing bog along the hull centerline and keel root where the three pieces bolted together and primer and we were all thrilled to see how the black high gloss still looked great. The least little imperfection will jump out at you in gloss Awlgrip! I spent a lot of time using the Zebra stripes on the 3d hull model when doing the design in Rhino and it all paid off. The tooling programmer at PSOV was very complimentary on the degree of the surfacing. We had hoped to get three or four pulls off of that female mold which was surfaced with a product called DuraTec. Pity that the boat itself has never been launched and has been in build for over 5 years!
Thanks Mark. Found the gallery, but looks like mainly rendered images, and many people making models of other companies’ existing products. (like hey, I modeled a Harley, here’s my render of it).
https://discourse.mcneel.com/c/galleryKeen to for others to share their actual photographs of original product designs modeled in Rhino.
Since you mentioned it, Harley does use Rhino for modeling the fuel tanks, fenders, side covers, fairings, saddle bags, and tour pack.
They use a parametric solid modeler for the engine, transmission, and frame.
For many hard to model things, or for the splitting up/planning of models for fabrication Rhino is heavily used. Also many toolmakers use it to make non-parametric changes. Heavily used in pretty much all consumer products that have been designed and crafted and don’t look like a lazy Solidworks tutorial.
That’s very interesting. So they’re using it for the more organic shaped parts. Do you happen to know what they use for the parametric modeler alongside Rhino?
LOL, yeah. I’m a mainly SolidWorks user up till now, and wanting a better tool for more complex / organic / free form shapes. Longing to see some great real-life examples here 
Matthew Gueller at the HD design center told me what they were using for a solid modeler. I had heard of it before but I can’t remember it now.
Pretty much everything you see on this page
https://www.businessaircraft.bombardier.com/fr/avions/global-7000#!#bba-pdp-section-3
And here http://www.brioinnovation.com/brio-innovation--realisations.html
Ha! So you know exactly why I mean. Solidworks is great for mechanical modeling and some simple surfacing. Also it works quite well with Rhino. You can import your ‘challenging blobs’ and use them as a starting points of your parametric featuring. Then you can update your imported reference… and sometimes the model will update, sometimes it’ll break. You’ll figure it out quickly where that happens and why.
I worked at Bose for a chunk of my life, half of their products are designed in Rhino. All complex automotive parts were Rhino. Quite a lot of the organic headphones are Rhino or Siemens NX, depending of who did them. All hard to figure out speaker grilles are done in Grasshopper.
Funny story: I worked on a project with a very fancy supercar company, who is known for using Catia. And they brag about it a lot. Their chief engineer had a laptop in a basement, off the grid for ‘emergencies’. Where he would go and bring a file of a problematic model or complex fit issue in a thumbdrive, launch Rhino and work a solution there.
Rhino is the porn of CAD. Everyone says they don’t use it and that they have better methods, but if you pay attention… it’s everywhere. (Bob, you can use this for Marketing)
G
I use Rhino and Grasshopper and own tools to create patterns on car exteriors in conjunction with Icem Surf Usually we use Rhino as an assistant cad software, because of Rhinos excellent coding abilities, which not only lets you fast and easily create custom solutions, but also opens up a world for a great and feature diverse plugin library.
One of my favourite project during the last years:
Every pattern on the exterior you see here, was made by me using Rhino, I also participated in the surface engineering of the “facelift” parts. Although these patterns are rather “boring”, it took quite an effort to solve problems regarding technical aspects, safety, flange angles, flow of highlights and filleting in general. Everyone using Rhinocommon may know its limitations regarding freeform surfacing.
This is The Morpheus Hotel, designed using a few thousand Rhino models, backed up with a few hundred Grasshopper scripts, equating to a document of around 200,000 pages !! Its a little beyond my average modelling skills, when I’m having a frustrating day I think about the team who must have scratched their heads many times producing this building . Zaha Hadid Architects I believe, view[here]
Hi @cbecks
Just a few examples of “real” products made in Rhino - medico, audio, security, access control… the list goes on and on. All shapes and sizes 
Regards, Jakob
Good thread, intersting to see real life examples from the horses mouth and not a bunch of googled renders
Organ Console, navy dolphin in rhino then CNCd
Organ Console and Casework
Organ Console design and all carvings in Rhino
