Wacom Cintiq or Intuos with Rhino

I own a intuos tablet and I’ve tried several times to use it with Rhino. I repeteadly came to the conclusion that I’m much faster/productive using a mouse. Runnie suggestions would improve things a lot, but another thing I would love to see would be a the ability to sketch on a surface and to use the sketched lines/curves to generate extrusions or revolutions.

Cheers,

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I have an intuos pro Large; but rarely/never use it for 3D; apart from 3D paint in Quixel.

I am a chronic screen dump & markup-er; so the integrated plugin for on-screen markups would be great, along with any interface aids.

I think the reason I don’t use it often is that I am generally doing CAD-based work - Architecture - where accuracy is important; so I’ve always found that using accurate CAD drawing techniques a little cumbersome on the tablet (may be a learning curve thing).

I also find the pen tracking when a long way from the tablet distracting. I think I might prefer to have finger input be Pan/Orbit/Nav/etc, Pen for paint/brush strokes relative to previous location. This could be ‘toggled’ with an click=on, click=off (rather then hold=on, release=off).
Like drawing by hand on a large sheet and moving the sheet (canvas) around so your arm/wrist can stay in the same place… I think this trick would also add value to the smaller tablet sizes, although not really an issue for me since the usable tablet area is further than I prefer to reach with any one stroke.
The above finger input for Pan/Orbit/Nav/etc would also negate the need to reach for the mouse, or click the pen buttons to activate those functions. Furthermore; on the mouse I can click, hold LMB (ie not release) then using RMB/MMB pan/orbit while dragging whatever tool I pressed LMB for - I don’t think this kind of operation is possible on the tablet?
(although I havn’t proactively looked for ways to do the above; might be possible intuitively already.)

lastly, in most of my workflows I use almost every key on my keyboard for 1-3 key shortcuts for the commands I activate often with my left hand while mousing with my right hand.
Since my tablet is large, my hands become too far apart if try to have my full sized numpad keyboard alongside my tablet - so having a on-tablet shortcut menu would be great too… (pretty sure there were already some suggestions for how this would work)

Thanks for taking an interest in the Rhino/Wacom users! :slight_smile:

Have you seen Google Tilt Brush , the VR painting tool? If you have, I wouldn’t need to say more.

If you haven’t, reach out Nvidia and we’ll arrange to give you a demo.

Hello Tom, I have been using wacom tablet very intensely since 1994, more or less. Regular 6x8 or 4x5 tablet, no Cintiq. My work has been for lots of years as a photoshop photo retoucher.
I tried to adapt the wacom tablet to use with rhino with no satisfactory result. The main reson was the use of buttons.
I obtained better results with a Logitech trackball where I can use left/right click more effectively without losing the precision.
Best,

Hi Tom,
I’m Wacom user but I never thought about using it for 3D (architecture) modelling. I guess it would deserve stronger promotion at first, if it really is worth using!

-jonas

Try this, problem solved:

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Also, I use my Bamboo Pen and Touch (2012) daily for jewelry and general organic modeling on Rhino and sometimes T-splines, and personaly work a lot faster using it rather than a mouse, more confortable and precise…
My setup is:
Pen tip as left click
Lower pen button while “hovering” the pen tip, as right click
and Upper pen button as middle click, to open popup menu.
Eraser button useles in my case.
Touch funtions useless in rhino and pretty much everywhere else…
Side buttons to help with more “precise clicking” (as the user of the cintic pointed, sometimes liftting
the pen tip to release the click may move the mouse a few pixels).
Windows gestures, that horrid “press and hold” junk, and feedback all disabled…

Another thing that helps me is to reduce the active area, I already have a small tablet, but I find limiting the amount of hand movement necessary to reach across the display more usefull…
My setting are NEVER LOST and it would be very bad to be forced to redefine them everytime.
The positions of the buttons are good for me, and would probably misclick them a lot if they were lower…

You know what part of Rhino I don’t like to use with tablet? Grasshopper… it feels WEIRD… It doesn’t seem to “pan” like you would expect, and has that crazy mouse warping going on…

One thing Rhino (probally not Wacom) could do is give the option to completely customize viewport manipulation, like change the button or combination to pan, orbit, zoom and etc…

Totally agree; some flexibility here would help me train staff who’ve only ever used autodesk products immensely!

I also use Wacom Intuos Pro. I have not tried it with Rhino yet, but would definitely like to.

Hi, I have been using Wacom with Rhino for more than 12 years now.I am happy to have a chat and discuss more in detail.

Absolutely right! I wrote to McNeel a couple of years ago and their response was “I’ll add this as a bug. This is going to take a while. I’ll have to dig up a wacom tablet to use for some testing. Thanks for reporting this”

I am using Rhino on a Wacom Cintiq 27 QHDT.
The single most important thing that McNeel could do to improve my experience using Rhino on a tablet is to give more freedom/flexibility in arranging the UI elements.

Using a program with a pen on a tablet (especially a screen-tablet) is quite different from mouse based navigation. Placement of UI elements is much more important.
The first thing I changed in my workspace, was trying to arrange all the tools to the right of the screen, to avoid clicking icons on the left side of the screen with my right hand.

My goal was to have one single modeling window with minimal borders, taking up as much of the screen hight as possible and oriented to the right with all of my toolbars and panels on the right of it.
But placement of toolbars, panels ecc. is too limited in my opinion.
I had to make lots of compromises in placing toolbars and finished with large borders around the modeling window.
Also the workspace is not totally stable, restarting Rhino mixes up toolbar and icon positions/margins all the time, so I spend time to rearrange things a lot (to be fair this has always been a problem in Rhino, probably related to 3rd party plug-ins I guess. But it has gotten a bit better over time).

One brilliant feature in Rhino that helps a lot in customizing the tablet experience, is the possibility to make every toolbar into a popup toolbar or create custom popup toolbars. These can be aliased and evoked through the Wacom remote.
One way to even improve on this would be to look into Rhino native Autodesk style “pie menus” to navigate these popup toolbars.

Cheers, Norbert

I’m using Intuos 4 Small because I have now some problem using mouse with my hand (pain in a few fingers of the hand to the overuse of the mouse),

My workflow now is very slow because the tablet miss some function as a weel to zoom quickly (the round in the actual tablet isn’t so confortable or practical).

I made an image with a my proposal to optimize the tablet.

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Ctrl + the right mouse button on your pen while hovering the pen

hey guys I am a new intuos pro user…and I have a problem with the right click…the right click button works on all apps except for rhino …anyone know why it does that? any solution?

In the Wacom driver you are able to define the button behaviour for individual applications if you want to. Did you set these for Rhino?

I’m really excited to see wacom interested in developing ways to better utilize their tablets in rhino. I’ve been using a tablet since intuos2, I use intuos pro now, as well as the creative stylus for ipad.
I bought the intuos pro when it came out specifically to use touch gestures to navigate in the rhino model space, but found that it didn’t really work as desired. The only touch gesture that seemed to work was zoom. But i do think with a little work in this area it could be just as usefull as a 3d mouse for navigation.
I also agree that a sketch overlay for markup would be great.
The thing I find most useful about the tablet in rhino at this point is the radial menu. Being able to nest menus and program them with all my most used commands and macros is an incredibly powerfull feature for rhino users in my opinion.

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Hi Thomas,

Yes, the touch is flakey at best I’ve found.

I’ve been on Intuos tablets since… well, a long time :wink: I’m now using a Cintiq 24HD Touch and despite my initial excitement about being able to use the touch features for navigation, I’ve now got that turned off.
Instead I now use it in two monitor mode. I have the main Rhino screen on a second accurate Eizo monitor and all of my toolbars on the Cintiq. So I use the Cintiq just like a normal tablet when in Rhino and use the toggle screen button to access toolbars. This has the advantage of not covering up what you are working on with your hand and means I can layout lots of commonly used toolbars without cluttering up the workspace.

When in painting mode in Photoshop or 3Dcoat, I reverse the layout and have the main screen on the Cintiq to take advantage of what it was designed for and stash all of my palettes on the Eizo. Works a treat!

Steve

I’ve been using an Intuos Pen & Touch small with Rhino 5 for over a year and love it- even without some of the great custom controls suggested here. I use it with a 3D connexion space mouse, which alleviates so much needless clicking.

However, I have just switched from Windows 7 to 10, and the pen does not work well in certain areas of Rhino’s interface- such as right clicking in the layer panel or selecting sliders in Grasshopper. I removed & reinstalled drivers. Works well in other apps like Photoshop. Currently abandoning the tablet on Windows 10 and resorting to the mouse.

I have been using A4 and A5 wacom tablets since about 1995 (Mac Quadra at that time) in order to combat RSI. It worked very well and problems of that kind ceased. It worked so well that we acquired an A0 Wacom digitiser which also worked very well with Microstation and Maxurf (no Rhino in the office then).

I currently run Rhino and other CAD software on Windows 7 for design of marine vessels, using an Intuos and spacemouse pro linked to two workstations through a USB switch.

If Wacom could consider providing options specifically geared to Rhino that would be very welcome.

Two -ve points:

  1. The wireless mode of the Intuos never worked acceptably despite discussions with Wacom support which was disappointing. It is always used now on wired connection.
  2. The extent of the desktop area is not reset properly by the Intuos driver after having switched one of the 3 screens from displayport to dvi and back, (but can be recovered by starting the intuos preference panel and re-selecting the desktop extent).