Suggestion for Rhino that would help people who make how-tos

Rhino has a great feature - many commands remember the last option you chose and default to it (instead of the factory setting) the next time you use the command. Thanks! Great feature!

Except…

Quite often, I watch a how-to article or video and follow the instructions faithfully – and it doesn’t work when I do it. But it clearly works when the author did it!

And then I realized why. It’s that rememory feature on commands. The person making the lesson made a choice to a command that enables it to get the desired results. But they don’t remember making that choice, it’s now just part of their environment. Because they don’t remember making that choice, they don’t mention it in their instructions.

And that’s why it works for them but not for me. Sometimes I’m lucky and the video shows the command line (at a resolution I can read!!!) so I can figure out what’s different. Otherwise, I may have quite a lot of experimentation to do to get it to produce the desired results. Not fun. Wastes time.

It would be great if it was really easy AND EXTREMELY OBVIOUS for the author to know which command options aren’t factory default ones. The use of color and font would be one way.

ALSO allow an author to (a) save their current command defaults under a named file, (b) restore to factory settings, (c) do their article or video, and then (d) restore the command defaults from the named file. That way, people who actually already know how to make the command work can figure out exactly which values actually work.

I suspect this would be a very easy thing to implement.

(And if it’s already implemented, let me know!!)

Hi David,

Thank you for your feedback. I catch myself doing this more often than not, unfortunately. We’re experimenting with some new methods of displaying exactly this behavior. One method we’re trying out is showing the key and mouse presses on the screen, so even if the instructor does something ‘to quick’ to be noticed, using this method we hope it will make it more clearly visible on the screen to follow. Also we’re working on implementing adding the script on the side.

Best,

Arie from ThinkParametric.com

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Thanks, Arie!

I’m hoping they’ll add these features to Rhino to make everyone’s job easier!

Just thought of another feature. Have a start/stop button that writes all the commands, in full, with all parameter values filled in, to a file the user can name. Different colors for non-default values would be nice, too.

That way, folks doing how-tos could post that file and there would be no confusion about what they did.

Hi @david_wendelken. I’ve created a report, thank you! Can you please send an email to tech.eu@mcneel.com with the same topic as the subject?