Which Way is Up?

Unrolling a complex surface, such as a ship hull or a 15" Dahlgren gun barrel usually takes the shape of unrolling segments and then stitching them back together. By default, Rhino plops the unrolled surfaces down at the grid origin. How the pars come to lie depends on the surface direction. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't commonly keep track of that. With a bunch of similar-looking surfaces lying around I have a hard time sorting out what goes where.

Here I'm taking advantage of the fact that annotation dots placed on a 3D surface get unrolled with that surface (as long as you include it in your selection) So a dot labelled "frontRight" or "outside" will indicate the front-right edge of the surface in question.

Presto!

Some Rhino Shortcuts

Rhino is a great tool, but out of the box some of the commands are not exactly accessible - too many mouse clicks to duplicate an edge, or do an intersection. Custom toolbars, such as this one are cool, but keyboard shortcuts are still quicker! Through the options menu I've customized the keyboard settings for the ten or so commands I constantly use:
CTRL-C = _copy
CTRL-M = _move
CTRL-U = _unrollSrf
...

Applied Lofting

Many card model designers who use Rhino have express a dislike for the loft command, instead preferring to model surfaces from rail/cross section curves. I must say that I've shared that view until very recently.

I read the excellent tutorial on hull modeling available here and am thoroughly smitten with it. I now find it very easy to model an almost-perfect hull from little or no source information, then refine the result, create lines and finally create a developable hull from those lines. Very quick, very efficient!

Image © Gerard Peterson. Linked from http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.aspx/McNeel/HullMod.html

Copying objects from one Rhino file to another

Sometimes I find that I've accidentally deleted a curve or surface, or I might just want to step back to an earlier version of an object, but I don't want to lose progress I've made elsewhere in the file. In this case I open an earlier version of the file in a separate instance of Rhino.

1. Start another instance of Rhino. Open the earlier version of the file.
2. In the earlier version, select the object in question and choose EDIT > COPY (not TRANSFORM > COPY) .
3. Switch to the newer version and choose EDIT > PASTE. The object is pasted into a layer corresponding to the one if was copied from (i.e. it will create one if that layer didn't exist in the new file) and at the proper coordinates.

First off... some links to stuff I've already written

I've put a couple of design threads up at kartonbau.de. These might make for interesting reading.

Cleopatra
Ross Winans
Livadia

I've also started a couple of other threads. Works in progress, all of them.

Solferino
Ernest Bazin
Anglia

Why am I doing this?

Whatever new tricks and techniques I discover in Rhino, Illustrator or Photoshop, I forget quickly if I don't continue to use them. This blog is intended as an illustrated notepad - no plot, no consistency, just a collection of random thoughts on the design of paper models, mainly for my own edification.