The good folks at McNeel & Associates have released the 8th edition of their Rhinoceros software. This is 3 years after the release of Rhino 7. Rhino 6 was not even a year before 7 so this has been some time since the last release.
I interestingly took a stroll on the McNeel Wiki page and discovered that this first version of Rhinoceros was released October of 1998! That means over 25 years of Rhino, how cool is that.
Rhino 7 offered some major updated features that kept Rhino relevant, such as SubD modeling.
Rhino 8 also seems to be offering some great new tools to use. Shrinkwrap seems to be one that could have some major productivity improvements for digital makers that use meshes and 3d print a lot. Shinkwrap seems to work great on NURBS models that you don’t want to take the time to boolean together before exporting to a mesh. Watching the intro video on McNeel’s site with Kyle Houchens showed what I’m really excited about here: the better functioning mesh boolean functions. Oh, the days of nudging mesh cutting planes just right so the boolean would work or not eat have the mesh. This video showed meshes cutting cleanly and easily. A true Godsend if you ask me.
The new model improvements are intuitive and natural to use. I especially love the auto Cplane, it is a welcome adjustment, it just seems to be how it should of always been. I guess the only time it’s thrown me off is if I go to a ortho view with an object that is already off-plane and try to do some drawing with it still selected.
As I use it more, I am in the middle of a big project doing a lot of modeling in Rhino, reverse engineering parts, I will edit this post and add to the commentary on the new features or tweaks. I have been using Rhino since 2017 and it is my favorite modeling software to use. I’m sure I am approaching my 10,000th hour in this software. I want to be an advocate for the software as I believe it is easy to pick up for designers, and it a license you can truely own, which is rare today.
Cheers to the folks at McNeel for a successful release of Rhino 8.
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