What's a good file format for showing off your Rhino work?

Rhino Rhino for Mac
1

I am dipping my toes into Rhino. The learning curve is steep, but my engineering background seems to help. Except that I went ahead and got stuck, struggling with what is probably a trivial task to you pros :frowning:

I’ve put my first 3d model together: two cones and a ball, with a couple of textures applied. Ok, they are VERY cute cones, I am proud. Next step: show them to someone. Like, a non-engineering human. I bet you show your work to customers and such somehow. The idea is to find a viewer where my victim can rotate the model and watch is at any angle, with appropriate awe.

I am not asking lightly: I have tried exporting to at least half the file formats offered, but the results so far are not human friendly. Probably because many of the formats are intended for very specific use cases.

I tried iRhino on an iPad, but it ignores the textures. There seems to be no straightforward viewer for Android either.

I assume you guys export into some popular and convenient format, something that would bundle all the bits, pieces, and textures together nicely and would render predictably. What is this format and what are the good viewers?

Many, many thanks in advance!

2

You might investigate Iris, which would allow you to put your 3D model on a web page. Another possibility would be to use Simlabs 3D PDF creator for Rhino - but that’s a paid plug-in.

–Mitch

3

In addition to Helvetosaur’s suggestions, there are numerous simplified 3D sharing sites out there such as this:

https://p3d.in/

And some 3D applications have a web link sharing mechanism built in…

1 Like
4

You give me much hope!

Is there a good format+viewer combination that would work well on a disconnected tablet? - Many a demo in my life failed due to network connectivity problems at the worst moment possible.

Thank you!

5

If your ‘tablet’ is an iPad, buy iRhino. You can then download your .3dm files to the tablet and you are good to go.

6

Thank you, ec2638.
Sadly, iRhino does not support textures yet, and that defeats the shallow but essential goal of looking pretty…

7

I think surface or any other windows tablet
is good.

Rhino runs full for 90days, and even after that you can open files but not edit.

If you upgrade to V6, you use both mac and PC.

I got a GPD UMPC laptop and runs rhino just fine, raytraced is slow, but rhinoing view is ok.

8

Thank you for the support and suggestions!

I ended up exporting to COLLADA and then using EMB3D viewer - there is a version for both iOS and Android. Very convenient for casual demos.

If you follow in my steps please do pay attention to EMB3D packaging instructions: you will want to create a zip with all the textures in it.