You intrigued me with this thread, as an architect by profession and a Rhino user by hobby. I have a strong opinion about this topic and I won’t be able to sleep without typing a few paragraphs.
I have been using Revit, AutoCAD, 3Ds Max, Maya and occasionally Rhino for my daily work in large corporations for two decades. I rarely did any personal or freelance projects until 2017, when I felt that the 3D technology was stagnating. That’s when I explored Rhino and bought a V6 license as a hobby, since then this hobby evolved into freelance work with conceptual work, product design, architectural competitions and small residential buildings.
Earlier this year, my boss asked me to come up with 20 ideas to enhance our use of technology in the new decade, as we might face a recession soon and need to work smarter and more efficiently. I gave him 20 futuristic ideas, and the first one was ‘Invest in Rhino’. I admitted my technological preference, but I also argued that architects will suffer from a tech shortage in the next five years, when every software company is pursuing technology for Big Data, AI, Metaverse. And no one is actually offering good tools for the design community. This is beyond frustrating to me.
What makes Rhino special for Architects?
- No Marketing Teams: This means no false promises, no changes in plans, products or user experience. And the product is very consistent and reliable, most people learned about Rhino through word of mouth instead of big conferences.
- The most powerful 3D geometric engine with diverse capabilities.
- Great SDK (a healthy ecosystem of third-party developers).
- Easy to Learn, Hard to Master.
- Grasshopper. (The Gateway to Data Rich Design)
- Being a collection of different commands, Rhino can easily serve as a valid alternative to AutoCAD with a smoother learning curve for AutoCAD users.
- Also, the technology serving the Architectural Practice is completely flawed, I looked into our overhead expenses when it comes to the Autodesk Revit and the supporting plugins, it is ridiculous to see that 25% of my Billing Rate can be easily diverted into the subscription of a half-baked overpromising product that doesn’t work. I can easily combine three or four of the plugins into a single license of Rhino that can do even more.”
Why Architects uses Rhino?
- Geometric Exploration and Design Studies.
- Solving complex Facades, mostly with grasshopper.
- Energy and Environmental Modeling with Ladybug Tools.
- Ability to work directly with Fabricators for unique custom work.
- Advanced Building Research , Stadiums, Auditoriums, Isovist, …etc
- Recently Rhino.Inside.
Why Do Architects Avoid Rhino?
- Lack of Design Documentation tools : “Our work is not about designing buildings, but designing workflows to make the building design happen. We work in parallel to get the project designed, permitted, priced and value engineered. All in one process, this involves different design packages such as conceptual design sets, Planning Department Submission, Building Permit Set, Foundation Permits, Offsite and utilities permits, pricing sets, bulletins, addendums… etc. These packages need careful management and tracking of the drawings being issued and Rhino v8 cannot handle these tasks yet.”
- Inability to Handle Changes : Our work is characterized by frequent changes in our designs. We have to deal with a complex set of factors, such as Jurisdictional requirements, Political field, Client divorces, company mergers and even the recent interest rate hikes that made us remove two stories from a building a week before the structural steel was ordered. Therefore, it is essential for Architects to be able to issue, track and document any changes throughout the design and construction timelines. Rhino does not have this capability built-in.
- Another Software to invest in : it is not just the price of the licenses, but the logistics, workflows, company standards let alone the training of the individuals and teams to develop a sensible use for this product. I don’t think Rhino has an issue with that, and I feel soon many of the companies will find them selves stuck to get into the Rhino ecosystem, as other software companies are ignoring the voices of the Architectural community.
So, Does Rhino have a future in Architecture?
Absolutely, Rhino is positioned perfectly to gain widespread adoption within the Architectural community Globally, The Biggest Player – Autodesk – is clearly showing a form of distancing themselves from design software and looking towards position themselves as a Construction Cloud company, they recent push towards Autodesk Forma and their indirect statements discussing the end of desktop applications (Revit, AutoCAD) makes me anticipate a short-term gap left in our workflow caused by:
- Pause or slowdown in the development pace of Revit / AutoCAD, while directing most of the development resources towards ACC, Unified Database, Construction Coordination.
- The proprietary closed nature of these services will limit their ecosystem giving the designers little to no choice in defining their own workflow.
- Limited ability is sharing / transferring and collaborating design data (It is either their way, or no way)
Here is an interesting Article about the future of BIM, and why it is going to be imperfect.
Defining BIM 2.0 - AEC Magazine
So What Rhino can do to grow within the Architectural Design Community.
____ Keep the Rhino Spirit: Openness, Inclusive, Multi-disciplinary and great community.
____Better Documentation:
- Handling multiple drawing sets, Additional system parameters for Revisions, Packages, Print Sets….etc.
- Including time functionality to track project phases.
- Better handling of 3D scanned building data.
- Tabulation of Built-in Properties, User Defined Properties, and User Text.
- More control over Layouts, Layout sets and index Generation for the drawing set.
____Advanced Parametrics:
- Constraints.
- Parametric Blocks (2 decades after the release of Dynamic Blocks)
- Live Report of Elements properties (size, position, direction, materials…. etc.)
- Wiring of Parameters and user objects between multiple attributes / objects.
- Better Control and Management over block definition panels.
- Parametrics in Rhino to work in tandem with Grasshopper.
- One more wish for Tabulation.
I tested unreal engine, solidworks and blender for potential utilization within AEC, so far, I didn’t feel the alignment of features towards a wide adoption by architects, on the other hand, something that Rhino proved to be a valid contender. and I’m glad that I see a clear positive direction for Rhino in the next few years, you ask me how? Simply as a Revit Heavy Company, a lot of my peers doesn’t know Rhino but they know pretty well who is @Japhy and @eirannejad who are doing big contribution to the AEC community and it seems that Autodesk is realizing that, this is a screenshot from an Autodesk webinar about Forma and Data Rich Design.
So who is the #1 Believer in Rhino? Not me, It is Autodesk.