Rhino has confusing UI! Toolbars need reorganization!

I’m sure the good folk at McNeel will read and take on comments from new users, after all new users are the future :slight_smile:

The Rhino interface allows experienced users to select their preferred method for starting commands. If you want lists of commands grouped by relevance look at the drop down lists which are available on the second line of the Rhino screen just below the line with the name of the program, etc.

Also try a different approach to learning Rhino. Go through several of the free, online tutorials available at https://www.rhino3d.com/tutorials
Start with the User’s Guide and the then the sections of the Level 1 Manual and Level 2 Manual which are of interest. These are tutorials despite what you might guess from the names.

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The documentation doesn’t state this, but Rhino is actually a game, with an unknown number of “levels”.

It makes playing the game less boring.

Over time they will have to make the game even more challenging so a to not loose existing players, so no, don’t tell them. :wink:

Yes, there actually are some secret ways to cheat with this the game and get a faster route to the next level. :wink:

On Monday back to being serious again. But it must be said in context, I like Rhino.

// Rolf

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You mean ‘Menu’ as I called it? File, Edit, Curves, Surfaces, Solids…?

Yeah that was my initial thought once I realized toolbars are too confusing. But not all commands are listed at ‘drop down list under program name’. Commands like ‘AddGuides’ and ‘ShowEnds’ that look important to me are not accessible if you rely on Menu’s to access commands.

That was my problem. I used CAD software before, and I wanted to get a good grasp of what Rhino tools / commands can do. Wanted to see and test all tools to sketch a model before creating surfaces / solids or closed polysurfaces. And I was going through the menu until I realized that some commands are only accessible through toolbars.

You can say / think whatever you want, but Rhino UI and toolbars are a jungle. And devs should make their priority to upgrade the UI and organize toolbars in a more intuitive way. By default there is no ‘Curve Drawing’ toolbar enabled.

I starded using Rhino, I always model a spoon, fork and a knife. Then I model a wheel rim and a tire. And I realized I started to fight the UI / toolbars, tools I needed were always hidden behind a different tab. And I would find the same commands on different places. Thats bad you cant memorize where the tool is that way.

My humble opinion without bashing Rhino is that devs should start working on new UI and better toolbars organization ASAP. Rhino is old and proven and amazing software. Why not make it more visualy appealing, more organized and intuitive for new guys wanting to jump into in.

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Since Rhino is a “CAD swiss knife” its UI will never be a best fit for any specific group of users. Even if you are right in the the UI can be improved (and yes, it can) the fact still remains - a swiss knife will never be a best fit to any specific usecase. But it is at least useful for almost any usecase, which isn’t a bad thing.


Fig. A McNeeloRhinox knife

Therefore, make your own toolbars & UI. This will solve your problem.

Different “domains” (surface, mechanical, architecture aso) and different users typically use different workflows. The benefit of Rhino’s UI is that it supports customization and so it can be adapted to almost any workflow.

// Rolf

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My advice: Ditch the toolbars and get used to using the command line and alias. Work will be faster and you will have more viewport space.

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Dear RMA team,

Please hire this person (or someone with an equally critical, fresh and constructive viewpoint) to help you take a fresh look. All of you inside McNeel and all of us aging hackers who have been abusing (and have been abused by) Rhino for 20 years have completely lost touch of how bad its current UI paradigms are. It’s like the messy house that has clutter everywhere, and broken door knobs, and a weird smell, and you don’t even realize it anymore because you live there and you adapted and it feels like home.

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Thank you, for me this time I am reminded to appreciate adaptability and taking a adaptive approach now.

Rhino is very simple to learn if you just tie the learning experience to something you actually want to draw. If you’re trying to get into ‘the head’ of ‘the developer’ you’re wasting your time. No such high order entity exists and you’ll just be frustrated trying to match wits. Everything is there but you only really find it and make it familiar when you need it.

What I am doing first after installing Rhino - is rearranging ALL toolbars and buttons… This TAB organisation - looks strange to me and it is difficult to remember all those changing buttons depending on which tab is clicked… So - I live in V5 (Classic) style. I picked all the commands I use mostly, and forget this TAB nightmare… IMHO

Geez, it’s really messy and needs icon search in 4 different directions.
I used to have single viewport on one screen and almost all the toolbars on the second screen :-), but it was V4 era before I started using shortcuts.

Chris: Rhino is very simple to learn if you just tie the learning experience to something you actually want to draw. If you’re trying to get into ‘the head’ of ‘the developer’ you’re wasting your time. No such high order entity exists and you’ll just be frustrated trying to match wits. Everything is there but you only really find it and make it familiar when you need it.

Exactly this. If you go into it knowing / having an idea of what you want to create, then the commands you might need are intuitive. Say for example you are trying to create an extremely simplified version of something like this:

You know that the very first step should be creating a rectangle. “Aha!” - your brain says - “Why not try the rectangle command?” Type in rectangle and depending on the view you are in, you can draw it out. (Something that helps a lot is to try out the different options on the command bar once you have entered a command: for example something like a rectangle has a variety of ways to be created like through dimensions, click drag, etc.)

Moving on, once you have a rectangle you know that you need it to twist in the middle. Since in any 3D software there will typically be a combination of points, edges, surfaces etc., it can be assumed that you would need to somehow rebuild the surface and/or edit control points in order to be able to select and twist them. Carrying on with this approach you would find almost anything that you need to get done, as long as you approach it with a little bit of intuition. Any time I need to do something and am not sure if it is possible, I type a keyword into the command bar just to see if anything will pop up - 9 out of 10 times it does.

An aside: I understand that you are a beginner to learning Rhino and so I wanted to share the method that I learned the software: I started learning by iterating dimensions. What I mean by that is that I started with a point in space, then from there connected two points to become a line, either copied and connected or drew a surface to, well, make a surface, and so on. This method allowed me to understand the steps of what I was doing, and seeing an object being created or developed in space prompted me to try new things. For example what if I curved a line before extruding? What if, when creating a surface, I pulled a corner down? So on and so forth. The program is extremely intuitive once you get used to it, and with practice it gets easier and easier.

Best of luck!

Thanks everyone!
I like what you did there Dimetro, and what you say about those “changing buttons depending on which tab is opened”, exactly whats bothering me. Each “tab” has different “sidebar”, and when I memorize tool location in the sidebar, and move to different “tab”, I get lost for a second as I can’t find the tool where it was a minute ago. That’s only one of the confusions I have with toolbars in Rhino!

Thariquedesilva I think the same way as you do, how you described you go about working on your model. The issue I have is I don’t know all the commands, and what Rhino is capable of. And when I’m drawing a sketch, I would like to have all the ways to drive lines / curves in a categorized toolbar or menu, so I can have an overview of all the ways for me to draw lines / curves while sketching. When I would like to create surface from that sketch, again I would like to move to a different tab or part of the screen, where I could see all the commands that can create surface. If I decide to edit something then I would love to have another tab that has all editing commands.

Neat thing about Rhino is that it already has that simplicity built in. For example, Rebuild command is the same for lines, curves, surfaces, closed surfaces. Same command applies to all those object types. But in toolbars we have “Curve tools” toolbar with “Rebuild curve” tool, and in “Surface tools” we have “Rebuild surface” tool. Both icons have different names and icons, but they call the same command, “_Rebuild”! FFS!!!

Or look at the “New in V6” toolbar, there is a new tool called “Select Pictures” listed there. By default, you have “Select” toolbar and “Select Pictures” tool is not listed there. In Menus too, Edit → Select Objects does not have “Select Pictures” tool. It should be under both toolbar and menu.

And try to understand me now, I don’t know all the tools Rhino has as I just started learning Rhino. And since toolbars are confusing as I explained above, it can easily happen to me that I will never see and learn some tools exist. Sometimes tool is only accessible through toolbar, sometimes through a menu, sometimes through a toolbar that has nothing to do about the tool that is listed there. For example now I’m playing around with modeling a TV stand, and I don’t know if there are tools like Push and Pull like in Sketchup, can’t find them under Solids toolbar / menu, guess they don’t exist in Rhino, but I don’t trust toolbars and menu anymore, maybe they are hidden somewhere!

Imagine a text editor that has Bold, Italic and Underline tools. Now Bold is accessible only through menu, and Italic is accessible only through an icon in the toolbar. And Underline, its not listed nowhere, as everyone knows that they just need to type _underline in console. But what if you have a user that sees text editor for the first time in his life and does not know that you can underline a text? And then you have “Bold Capital” and “Bold Lowercase” tools that are just Bold tools but have different names and icons. That’s how Rhino toolbars look to me at the moment. Just look at how many reddit posts are there where people ask how to do something, then Rhino veteran helps the guy and names a tool he can use do do whatever he wanted, and then the guy replies something like “Oh wow, Rhino is so powerful, I’m using it for XX years / months, didn’t knew this tool / command existed”. Yeah, that’s not cause its powerful, its cause its toolbars are a jungle.

I’m not writing this to bash Rhino, as I love it, I really do!!! Its an amazing CAD software. Its lightweight, simple and powerful, just how I like it. Only those toolbars are too big of a mess at the moment. You can use my experiences to improve Rhino, as everyone new to Rhino will feel the same as I feel, you can use my input to make Rhino better. This is my 2nd encounter with Rhino, I uninstalled it first time as it looked too messy, confusing and complicated. I opened all the available toolbars to see the tools and ended up with this:

Except for messy toolbars, UI / UX are amazing in Rhino. Options are well organized, Menus are also well organized and categorized, except some tools are not listed there. And even the toolbar system is amazing, it enables us to customize toolbars and even Menu’s and create our own workspace. But for someone new coming into Rhino its not a big help since we don’t know what tools exist in Rhino. For someone with 10 years of experience with Rhino its amazing, but for me, not so much. I mean If I can’t find tool in toolbar, what should I do? Go through source code to discover what commands exist?

Anyways that is just my opinion, not trying to bash Rhino or offend anyone. But I think Rhino toolbars should be reorganized. The underlying system is in fact powerful. I don’t even have anything against the way it looks. New theme or new visual design would be great, but its not a deal breaker for me really. Just that I can’t get a grasp of what Rhino can do, and see all tools categorized neatly.

Thanks everyone! Hope Rhino gets redesigned UI, as Rhino deserves it!

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Have a look at the Rhino Command Quick Reference which lists all Rhino commands, shows their symbol, and which menus and toolbars they appear on.
https://docs.mcneel.com/rhino/6/help/en-us/commandlist/command_list.htm

I found link you posted before, but I find this more useful:
http://docs.mcneel.com/rhino/6/help/en-us/index.htm#seealso/sak_3ddigitizing.htm%3FTocPath%3DCommands|By%20function|_____1

I’m accessing tools through a Menu, and using link I posted above to check if there are some other tools that might be useful for what I’m doing at that moment. Its neatly organized by function there! :smiley:

Thanks man!

A Rhino basic which may be confusing to some new users: Some Rhino commands have options which cause the command to behave in different ways. The Line command is an example. Line without any options suggested just draws a line between two points. However there are numerous other ways the Line command can be used such as to draw a line normal to a surface, or tangent to a curve, or perpendicular to two curves, or a bisector line for an angle, or …….

Some but not all of these different ways to use a single command have their own symbols on various tool bars.

I frequently use the menus rather than the toolbars when I don’t know the name of a command which does the task I want.

I do exactly what you do. Mine looks nothing like yours. Therein lies the point.

Reorganized - Familar - Effective

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what works fast for me is remembering regular commands I use and just typing a couple key first letters in the command line, which seems to be active all the time, like LI gives me line command to select, PL shows up planarSRF I can select, POL I can see and select the POLYLINE command I want at the time. I also get to see hints of other command I might get interested in, whats that too. I think I got that habit from my autobad days.

It is the same for me.Using that ones https://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/acadaliases speeded up my work a lot. Also some shortcuts like !_Invert Hide