There are plenty of hidden or test commands in Rhino that it would be nice to have a new command called “List test commands” to show what’s not yet fully implemented in Rhino 6 but may appear in Rhino 7.
- Among the commands that I use quite often is the splitting surfaces by edges. It’s pity that this option remains hidden and many people have no clue about it. It helps when a surface can’t be split by another surface or polysurface, even though they touch together perfectly. There are two ways to execute the split by surface edge command:
a) Run the regular “Split” command, then write “crv” (without the commas) and when prompted to select cutting objects simply pick the surface edges that you want.
b) Use the following command “! _Split _Pause _Curve”. I actually assigned this to the right mouse button where the original command was “! _Split _Pause _Isocurve”. Splitting by isocurve is already listed in the command prompt, so I don’t need it as a dedicated button. But splitting by surface edges saved me a lot of frustration when the basic split command fails.
You can combine splitting by surfaces and surface edges by selecting the surfaces first, and then the surface edges.
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(tip to Rhino 5 users) In Rhino 5 it was possible to use two different commands to isolate the selected objects with two add-ons called “Isolate object” and “Isolate selection”. One of them even remembered the isolated and other objects when saving the scene and opening it later. This is what I used as a primary isolate of objects command to isolate only a few of the models. Then, if I wanted to further isolate only one of them, I ran the other command and that was a secondary isolating of objects. Then I was able to revert to the primary isolating and show only the few objects that were isolated at the beginning. If I ended the primary isolating, the full scene was shown again. It would be nice if such functionality was implemented in Rhino 6 as well.
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When using the “Match surface command”, sometimes the resulting surface is flooded by a huge amount of newly created control points and spans. To avoid such over-complexity while using the “Refine match” option, I simply change the tolerance in the “Distance” box from 0.01 mm to a higher number such like 0.05 or 0.1 etc. You may notice that quite often the “Refine match” option will increase the complexity of a surface when the match is G2, but it stays simple with G1. If you wan to have G2 continuity but still keep the surface as simple as possible, remove the marking from “Refine match” and use G2. Then run the “Match surface” command again and this time turn on the “Refine match” and choose G1. This will result in something like G1.5 and should work fairly well in most situations.
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When using curves or surfaces to split surfaces, Rhino sometimes tends to project them improperly (even in the parallel views), thus it splits the surface in a slightly deviated area. That may produce eventual errors and even creation of a bad object. It happens when I want the new cutting line to be very close to the border of a surface, especially if they are at a very small angle. To make a perfectly accurate split and avoid errors, I temporarily increase the tolerance from “Rhino options > Units > Absolute tolerance” from 0.01 mm to 0.001 or 0.0001 mm. After I complete the splitting, I revert to the original tolerance. It would be nice if Rhino uses more accurate tolerances only for the split/cut commands, while keeping the absolute tolerance for the other commands at their default.