I’ve learned a lot over the past year, and the most useful knowledge came when coworkers showed me their preferred ways of solving everyday problems. Some of these commands I ended up using on a daily basis and saved me countless hours. The idea of this thread is for you to share some of your tips with you think might save others some time with common tasks. It would also help if you shortly describe what you mainly use rhino for.
For me as an architectural assistant commands like SetPt, CurveBoolean, TweenCurves, Isolate, CageEdit, Cap were probably the most helpful.
Here’s one I use a lot when working over reference geometry such as reverse engineering from scan data… SetObjectDisplayMode
You can then, for instance, make the mesh you’re surfacing over use Ghosted or a similar custom display mode independent from what you have the viewport set to.
The last trick I learned, though it’s not a command, might have been when drawing a polyline to Ctrl+click on your previous point to draw vertical according the Cplane.
When prompted for a second point you can also just type a distance and enter. That constrains the distance from the first point, Then click on something in the correct direction and you’ve shown Rhino the Direction.
SelLast (I use ‘sx’ as quick alias) is probably the most useful ‘hidden’ command I know of. While many operations unselect objects that have just been created or modified, this gives and instant access to them. Using it probably 100s times an hour. Make sure to first run _-SelLast (with dash) and set DeselectOthersBeforeSelect=No. The default Yes is less useful. The new setting with stick and you won’t have to worry abut it ever again.
When Rhino prompts for a “next point”, typing .x or .y constrains the point at “that” level in X or Y. I don’t use it very often but when I do need it, it’s pretty handy.
Wow, i’m really glad to see so many replies already.
Another useful thing I use all the time (although it requires special hardware) is using mouse gestures (like the Logitech MX Master) for some commands. I use Press+SwipeUp and Press+SwipeDown to quickly isolate and show objects.
Keeping “YES” would deselect what was previously selected and only select the newly created/modified objects. Typically if you have selection from before, I would think it is for a reason and you don’t want to lose it. That’s why NO is more intuitive and useful, I think.
Yep, in fact this reminds me, because I get at SelLast slightly differently, that one thing I believe many users do not know about are the customizable context menus in Options > Context menus:
One other thing I recently “discovered” is if you long-press LMB on an object to drag, it will find a closest snapping point and use it while dragging. Took me 15+ years to find that one
SelPrev deals with selection only, and actually many times it just doesn’t work. So it is a different thing. SelLast deals with newly created or modified objects, which often are not selected after the operation. Most commonly I would thing if you created/changed something you want to select it for further action, hence I find that command very useful.
Selection commands generally do not de-select and replace the selection (i.e. No to that option) . I think the option was added so that you could override that and isolate the last thing created.
