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Rhino 7

A new version of Rhino is a rare and unpredictable occurrence and therefore always welcomed by its broad, devoted user base. The latest release is probably the most feature rich update in its history. AEC Magazine talks with company CEO Bob McNeel and Scott Davidson, business development

Rhino occupies a very special ital workflows, and digital fabrication BIM, ACCA Edificious and many others. place in most AEC firms’ starts to become more common, Rhino’s It’s a potential invisible wire harness for all armouries. Despite the success importance is becoming even more data between BIM and / or viz systems. of the multi-purpose 3D CAD apparent. Rhino 7 includes a host of other new featool, its developer, Robert McNeel and In addition, there is Grasshopper, tures and is arguably the biggest release in Associates, doesn’t operate like an which sits inside Rhino and has become the product’s history. These include SubD American corporation. In the single most used gen- (SubDivision) surfaces, which look to be fact, it is the very antithesis of how most CAD software firms function. BOB MCNEEL erative design platform, driving everything from simple Python scripts to great for exploring organic, manufacturable shapes in architecture, a new display pipeline, enhanced drawing creation, bet-

McNeel is employee defining the surfaces of ter rendering and easier access to owned, privately held, and the most complicated Grasshopper scripts. More details can be these things combined are curved buildings being found in the box out on page 21. probably the reasons why manufactured today. With such an epic release, AEC the company is so loved by However, defining Magazine caught up with company CEO its customers. Of course, it’s geometry isn’t Rhino’s Bob McNeel and Scott Davidson (business also low cost and an absolute only superpower. With development) to dig a little deeper into the monster when it comes to defining complex geometry. At the heart of the devel‘‘ A user may think broad support for industry formats and the unique ‘Rhino.Inside’ developfeature set of Rhino 7, together with some exploration as to how Rhino is developing into a collaboration and data sharing tool opment ethos is the concept that Rhino is a generic modelling tool, neither skewed they’re working in Rhino and ment platform, the power of Grasshopper and Rhino geometry can actually be within the broader AEC space. AEC Magazine: We’re finding that architowards manufacturing nor another one may used as a glue to link BIM tects are getting increasingly frustrated architecture, and equally think they’re systems and drive geome- with BIM tools because they want to get applicable to both. While new features may provide core functionality, working in Revit. But they’re try creation in popular BIM modellers that lack the generative ‘chops’ or back to designing, as opposed to getting bogged down in detail documentation. They want design fluidity through applisuch as mould design, it’s actually working are notoriously unfriendly cations from various providers. Rhino. not essentially a full or dedi- in this combined in OpenBIM environ- Inside is already making a mark here. cated feature set, and other developers or customers are product ments. Rhino Inside has been Scott Davidson: If you look at the philowelcome to develop on top. Rhino is just as at home in ’’ in development for some time and Rhino 7 sees the sophical BIM process, what we’re seeing is very much a move toward wanting the sneaker development, jewellery design, official release of Rhino.Inside.Revit, freedom to design and not to worry so auto body, CAM, as it is in ZHD or Foster + which brings Rhino and Grasshopper much about the details of Level 300. I Partners - the only rule being that the into the Autodesk Revit environment. know it’s important at some point in the geometry it defines can be manufactured. Rhino.Inside also works with ArchiCAD, project, but it’s not important now.

As the AEC market moves towards dig- Unreal Engine, Unity, Blender, BricsCAD And we’re also seeing where part of the

model might be at a LoD 300 already, but a different part might still be an LoD 200 because not the whole project gets done at once. The only reason this became clear to us is because of Rhino.Inside.Revit. We are starting to see how people are using the two applications. Customers want to be able to use Rhino longer in the process, get more analysis, more data, more freedom to design, and then they want to get it over to Revit quicker.

Now, what’s also interesting is I’m finding many times, they want to take parts of the building out of Revit and they want to put it back into LoD 200.

It’s beautiful. People can now literally, with Grasshopper, wire that system up and as the project moves forward, they can wire the relationships - those relationships are dynamic.

A stupid, but good example would be that the floors are pretty set, you’re in design development, but you’re still kind of messing with facade. In this case, we’re feeding floors into Revit. And they’re real floors, they’re super hard coded. The floors may live in Revit and we can pull those floors into Rhino dynamically.

If we are just doing the façade in Rhino - here’s my maximum span and my material - I can embed that in the Rhino model and have that automatically fill into the Revit model. When I’m ready I can have it fill in. As I’m messing with the façade in Rhino, the Revit model is updating, and the drawings are getting done. SDKs (Rhino and Revit). It’s possible to write lines of code in Python, where one call is using a Rhino geometry function and the next call is writing something to the Revit SDK library. We’re deeper core with Rhino.Inside than Dynamo is.

It’s almost too hard to get your head around what’s possible. I mean, we’ve even gone as far as writing a widget in Grasshopper that runs a Dynamo cluster.

SD: Yes, you can actually drive a Dynamo definition as a component in Grasshopper. A whole Dynamo one dimension is a single component Grasshopper. But its integration is crazy. I mean, the workflows that are possible are just nuts.

You do have to understand both. That’s part of the problem. There are only a few people that understand Rhino, Grasshopper and Revit to the extent in Revit API where this is possible.

BM: Of course, we’ve had this in the field for a while, but what we’re basically finding is those internal teams are the ones actually using this. What they’re doing is they’re actually just rolling out new tools to their user community of Revit users. And these Revit users may know nothing about what’s happening underneath. A user may think they’re working in Rhino and another one may think they’re working in Revit. But they’re actually working in this combined product.

Another thing that may not be obvious is that basically all plug-ins to Rhino and Grasshopper now run in Revit. And every Rhino plug-in, including CAM products and our development partners’ applications, they can all run in Revit.

SD: Also, the 49 file formats that Rhino reads and writes…. now Revit reads and writes those file formats too. It’s the biggest new version of Revit they’ve ever had!

AEC: We are amazed by how many features you’ve crammed into this new release. It’s like three releases in one! What were you thinking about when you decided on this feature list? Is it just a case of a whole load of things that didn’t make the previous release overlapping?

BM: It was a timing thing. Part of it was that we needed to get the SubD stuff up to par. A lot of that was core work that had to be done by very small group of people just because of the type of work it is. And so basically, it allowed other people to work on all the other stuff, which just needed to be hooked up. It wasn’t inventing stuff from scratch, like the SubD project was, which was really going on for about three years.

This is core geometry. What that means is that you touch every Import/Export function, display pipeline, the picking engine, plus, then you’ve got to do all the core geometry work. And, the SubD stuff is a classic problem.

1 With QuadRemesh, Rhino can generate quad meshes from pretty much any group of surfaces, solids, meshes, or Sub-D surfaces 2 Rhino.Inside.Revit brings Rhino and Grasshopper into the Autodesk Revit environment

The classic SubD implementation is part, there’s not an obvious way to BM: My view is we need to let people stay basically just a mesh or refined mesh at always go back. in Rhino as long as long as they can. It’s various levels. For the Rhino community, not that we feel like we need to replace where everything’s got to be at manufac- SD: Every SubD has a NURBS equiva- something else that people are using. If turable precision, we had to develop the lent, but not every NURBS model has a people already have a solution out there, core technology to have the limit surface SubD equivalent, because they’re two dif- I mean, as long as AutoCAD or AutoCAD be a spline surface, not a mesh. ferent geometry types. But going back the clones are out there, I don’t think we need

That was the first bit of work, doing the other way, you know, that’s where to do drafting. robust math for that. While there are QuadRemesher comes in. We can Some of those things are cheap, some of many (research) papers on how to do it, it QuadRemesh and go back to SubD. them are basically free, and they are turned out most of them had a lot of Now it’s a different SubD, but it’s close to great drafting tools. That said, of course, errors and actually didn’t the NURBS. you know it’s a time consuming bump in work. I mean, they were just proof of concept. But then the other piece of it, once you got that calculaSCOTT DAVIDSON While you can take a mesh and QuadRemesh it and go to SubD, and therefore go to NURBS, there is a the process for customers. The one place that we can get away with doing drafting, I think, is what I would call shop drawings - put enough tion to work reliably, was that limit to how damaged the stuff on a piece of paper so you can hand it had to be fast as we needed mesh can be. We don’t have it to the guy in the shop, and maybe he to build a system that allowed all the tools to do mesh understands what you’re talking about, push / pull on a SubD object. repair in all cases. even if you’re also sending him the G That was actually a spline code. He’s still got a picture he can look surface that would change and update as quickly as a mesh-based version. ‘‘ Customers BM: We’re not dealing with crap scans. I mean, that’s a whole another ballpark at, as maybe he’s not able to look at the 3D model. You’ve got to give the people those tools. Consequently, we’re continually want to be able moving the bar up with each version. AEC: So how much better is this than T splines? to use Rhino longer in the SD: If you have a mesh, and the mesh is somewhat well defined, we can get it to One of the things which is not really a drafting tool, but sort of fits in that category of toolsets, is single stroke fonts. BM: Well, it’s better and it’s process, get SubD, therefore we can get it Yeah, these are used everywhere, all the different in a couple ways. There’s no patents involved, so that means that we can more analysis, more data, to NURBS. That makes sense. The whole idea that you can repair a mesh is not laser guys don’t want to burn the hell out of things, and welding robots that do bead welding. There are all kinds of publish this, we can let peo- more freedom exactly how we would put it. applications downstream that aren’t realple play with it, we can to design, and It would be more like, ‘we ly 2D drafting tools, but they’re 2D, right? expose it in SDKs [Sofware Development Kits], we can put it in open source projects then they want to get it over to can take a mesh and get it to a SubD using the QuadRemesh technology’. We’re always kind of bumping into those corner cases and we try to remove them because somebody’s exporting this that we support. Revit quicker And QuadRemesh is real- stuff out of Rhino, they’re putting it into In terms of data structures and stuff, our SubD is actually compatible with Pixar’s open SubD. ly the glue that allows us to go from mesh to SubD to NURBS. And in fact, many times from ’’ some kind of illustration or drafting programme, and then they’re trying to figure out how to get it off to a machine, or out So, if you use the same control net from NURBS back to SubDs, if you need to to the shop. our SubD, and hand off to another open do that. SubD project, they’ll get the same limit AEC: Laser scanning is now much more surface with their calculations. AEC: Rhino 7 was the first time the in focus and you’re enhancing point

Now, the other system’s output may be Windows and Mac versions were released cloud support. But you’re targeting large a mesh, but for downstream applications on the same day. What’s changed? point clouds, which I’m guessing is for like rendering, STL printing and, of architects? course, animation and all of that stuff in SD: I think part of getting a shorter timethe movie industry, they are identical, so line between multi-platform releases is BM: That’s another area where we just there isn’t a loss going that way. that we’ve gotten to the point where we’re tweaked things a little bit. Luckily for us,

But on the same hand, it can go the not writing the Windows version, and there’s also still some third parties out other way as a spline surface, so you can then releasing it, then turning around there that are working in that area. I just export it as a STEP file or whatever, and and having to essentially write the Mac saw some new stuff from ETH [ETH it’ll come in as ordinary B-rep. version again. Zurich]. They had a big research project going on and they just released a whole AEC: But then you can also turn it back BM: Yeah, we build from the same source suite of tools in a Rhino plug-in to deal into a SubD on demand? code now. And a lot of that work went on with this kind of stuff. with Rhino 6. The great part about the universities - BM: You can in certain cases. It depends they get a ton of money from the EU, on what somebody does with it later. If AEC: You’ve added some additional 2D research funding, and then they release you take a trimmed B-rep, something drafting features to Rhino? I thought you most of it to the public. So, somebody can with round holes, a typical mechanical were leaving 2D to other applications? build products on top of Rhino, or use

pieces of it. I would avoid promising anybody anything in that area.

AEC: How about rendering tools?

BM: That whole area is such a rat’s nest of stuff. We’ve always had a rich environment for plug-in rendering in Rhino. The first thing with Rhino 7 was to replace the rendering tools that we had in Rhino and replace the core rendering technology with Cycles, which is what’s in blender. And that just opens up a whole bunch of capability.

One of our guys is on the core team for Cycles in the blender project, so he’s going back and forth between what he’s implementing for us plus, making sure its compatible with a bunch of stuff, particularly on the material side, which is looking pretty good.

SD: This is good to talk about because it’s a pretty sophisticated advancement and not just as to what we have in Rhino. We have Cycles and Cycles is modern and supports a bunch of modern technologies like denoisers, right? Everybody has come out with denoisers lately - Nvidia, AMD and Intel all have their own denoisers, and we support all three. It takes renderings from 20 minutes down to two! Kind of crazy numbers.

Then you’ve got the materials. One of the things that people have asked for, for decades, is can I have compatible materials across multiple rendering tools? PBR (physically based rendering) done by Disney and Pixar and whoever else, is a step in that direction. We support PBR materials.

Now, PBR is really great, because you can do a lot of sophisticated maps and we can take the bitmaps and textures from another product and use those in ours. But, there’s some kind of unspoken advantages here such as Adobe Substance Designer outputs PBR materials.

So now you can use Substance and read Substance materials into Rhino and use them in your renders. You can also use Substance as a kind of a 3D painter. But if you want to talk about AR and VR, and virtual worlds, and all those things, if you look at Unity, or Unreal, or Nvidia’s Omniverse - they use PBR materials too!

Now, we’re pushing out to those, and have ongoing work to be compatible with Enscape, TwinMotion (which is free for Rhino users) and all of those type of tools. Rhino 7 is very much a play into all of this but it’s also a lot of the foundation work that’s going to play into AR/VR virtual worlds. We want to play, and we want to play well with all these tools. We want to be able to store their information and to be able to write their information out. Enscape is a great example; it’s very important and very popular.

AEC: So what is the AMD ProRender play for you then?

SD: ProRender is there. It’s AMD’s play into using their GPUs and we can support all that stuff. It’s one of our strategies and you’ll see this throughout Rhino 7, is that we are really trying to be compatible with the SubD engines, PBR materials, the way we can get in and out of other products. We are trying to be a better player on the world stage of CAD information. The possibilities are crazy, whether you’re a movie artist, a jeweller, or an architect, all have different platforms to work with.

As renderings change from the static image to the virtual, AR, and then at some point totally immersed, different universe (you know, aka the Unreal, Omniverse etc.), we’re working with all those partners to try to push forward and let people play.

This is an edited version of an extended article that can be found at tinyurl.com/Rhino7-AEC It covers additional topics such as the forthcoming support for Apple’s new M1 processor, injection moulded parts and toolmaking.

Rhino 7 - technology highlights

SubD surfaces

SubDivision surfaces are nothing new to the world of CAD, but the Rhino implementation, new for Rhino 7, is incredible, dynamic and totally interactive. This is great for exploring organic shapes quickly and removes the faceted nature of complex geometry meshes. McNeel’s SubD surfaces (pictured right) can be converted directly to manufacturable solids, derived from scans or meshes, as well as translated into NURBS.

QuadRemesh

Following on from SubDs, Rhino now has a very powerful command called QuadRemesh, which can generate quad meshes from pretty much any group of surfaces, solids, meshes, or SubD surfaces.

Display pipeline

GPU development is the one constant in the computer world that continues to drive acceleration of 3D software. Rhino’s OpenGL display pipeline has evolved to make use of the latest GPUs, shaders and graphics memory. The 3D display is now even more silky smooth and handles larger models, shaded working views, unlimited viewports, draw order support, clipping and full screen. Both Windows and Mac versions of Rhino 7 are significantly faster. McNeel claims up to 10x performance improvement in wireframe and shaded modes.

Documentation

Rhino is predominantly a 3D modelling package but McNeel occasionally enhances the drawing capabilities as the company recognises that there is still a need to provide drawings for fabrication. Rhino now has a Layouts panel, which simplifies many of the tasks associated with layout management, which was perhaps not as easy to use before. Gradient and transparent hatches have been added to enhance 2D drawing layouts and can be accessed from the horizontal tab below the viewports.

Grasshopper

A new GrasshopperPlayer command lets the authors of scripts distribute their Grasshopper files to run directly from the Rhino command prompt. The concept here builds on the idea that many firms have tool makers for projects and design teams, and this is easy way to include non-Grasshopper users in computational design. Clash is a Grasshopper component that can search through any selected objects to find objects that touch each other. One wonders whether, if this was combined with Rhino. Inside.Revit, it would be a quick way of clash detecting without ever really leaving Revit.

Rendering

Rhino has always had a range of options when it comes to rendering, either out of the box, or through the broad developer community. With this release, McNeel has sought to take the latest technologies for collaborative working with photorealistic modelling. Rhino 7 natively supports PBR (Physically Based Rendering) photorealistic materials, with emerging standards being backed by Pixar and Adobe, they are becoming the standard for material libraries, content authoring and scanning applications.

Similarly, McNeel has added support for the latest swathe of denoisers in Rhino, improving the quality of images and rapidly decreasing render times.

Flexibility for BIM in the cloud

AMD-powered cloud-based instances maximises remote productivity for leading Dutch construction firm TBI

As one of the largest networks of construction companies in the Netherlands, TBI certainly has the power to reach its key objective – to make a better world for people and for the environment. And it’s leading by example. With the Triodos Bank in Driebergen, The Netherlands, for instance, it built one of the most sustainable bank buildings in the world. With a green roof, solar panels, and natural provision of light, air and water, the building is completely energy neutral. And at the end of its life, its unique wooden construction means it can be easily disassembled, and the parts and materials reused.

Technology pioneer

TBI innovates in many other areas and is widely recognised as an IT pioneer. As Frank Wolbertus, BIM solution specialist at TBI SSC-ICT explains, the company’s eager embrace of Building Information Modelling (BIM) has helped further its capabilities and leadership in the world of construction. Using an optimised BIM process on the Western Scheldt Tunnel project, the longest highway tunnel in The Netherlands, TBI not only delivered the project within budget, but completed it three months ahead of schedule.

TBI is continually looking for new technologies to drive the company forward, so when Microsoft Azure released its latest GPU-accelerated NVv4 family of virtual workstation instances, TBI took notice. It realised this new AMD GPU+CPU platform was a great way to extend its strategic investment in Azure with a virtual desktop solution that offers both impressive performance and affordability, making it ideal for CAD, BIM and other demanding 3D applications.

A VDI veteran

Forever breaking new ground, TBI is not new to the idea of virtual desktops. It invested in its first on-premise Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution way back in 2010, but the cloud offers something different, as Wolbertus explains, “Our on-premise VDI solution was out of date, whereas the Azure Cloud is completely new. What’s more, we only have to do the imaging part and not the infrastructure, and don’t have to invest in hardware and GPUs - we only pay as we use it.”

Partners you can rely on

TBI’s engineers use a wide variety of CAD and BIM tools, including Autodesk® AutoCAD®, Revit® , Navisworks® and BIM 360®, as well as Solibri® , Bluebeam®, Bentley Systems®, Unity Reflect® , and Enscape© .

To help transition its core 3D applications to a virtual environment, it was essential to have the right partners in place, so TBI enlisted the help of external advisors from Autodesk Consulting and Thomas Poppelgaard. TBI is a Microsoft house, so it was a natural choice to go with Microsoft Azure. The company is also a long time user of Citrix who has a long-standing collaborative relationship with Microsoft, which meant that TBI could deploy Microsoft Azure resources seamlessly with its existing Citrix Cloud Services.

Both companies have a good track record and great support, plus a guarantee of great performance, stability and support for Hybrid Cloud.

The decision to go with the AMD CPU and GPU-accelerated Azure NVv4 instances was, as Wolbertus explains, for “a typical Dutch reason”.

“It was cheaper, and it performed the same as before,” he says, adding that TBI currently uses the Standard_NV8as_v4 instance in Azure for its BIM workloads. This is made possible by AMD’s innovative SR-IOV-based, GPU partitioning technology and Microsoft’s GPU-P technology, which allows the GPU resource to be split into different increments along with the CPU cores, memory and storage. The Standard_NV8as_v4 instance uses ¼ of a GPU resource and is priced accordingly, helping to better match the resource needs for the intended workload.

Cloud advantage

Moving to a cloud-based virtual desktop solution has delivered several benefits for TBI, as Wolbertus explains, “All machines are running on the same versions, all CAD is the same build,” he says, adding that instead of having to update 200 individual machines, VDI means only one machine needs updating as a golden image.

“We also have more graphical performance in VDI than local workstations/laptops. And it’s easier to keep up with technology in the cloud,” he adds.

Data security was another influencing factor in TBI’s decision to invest in a centralised workstation solution, as Wolbertus explains. “In the past we had a laptop that was stolen with high security documents, and with this new solution there are no documents stored on the laptops the users are provided with, as they connect to the TBI Cloud workspace.”

The move to virtual desktops has also delivered major benefits to the construction site, specifically in the way engineers and

site managers access plans and designs, as Wolbertus explains, “TBI engineers went from large notebooks to small notebooks and iPads for access, so they don’t have big workstations anymore. And because everything is stored in the cloud, and delivered via Citrix, they have the latest information, including models, drawings and documents.”

The impact of COVID-19

Like most AEC firms, TBI has felt an impact from COVID-19. Prior to the pandemic, most of TBI’s engineering staff worked in the office. However, the company’s flexible IT infrastructure helped smooth the transition to working from home. If required, engineers were allowed to take their laptop and dual monitor setup with them, then simply connect to the Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) as usual.

On one recent project - the renovation of the famous Binnenhof complex in The Hague, The Netherlands - the cloud proved critical through its ability to connect teams and other stakeholders in a completely virtual environment.

LiDAR scans of the prestigious historical government buildings were hosted in the TBI Cloud workspace where they could be accessed using Azure NVv4 and Citrix Cloud. A ‘live’ meeting between client and contractors meant all preparations and coordination could be handled completely digitally via video conferencing, allowing the project to move forward.

Technology futures

Always on the front foot, TBI is already looking to the future. According to Wolbertus, there are plans to expand access to Microsoft Azure and to also get more out of its project data. By tapping into the vast amounts of data it generates, it hopes to get better insight to help improve projects of the future. TBI continues to learn from the past to keep it one step ahead of the competition.

Triodos Bank -Driebergen, The Netherlands

About TBI

TBI is an agile network of companies that renews, caters for, and maintains a physical environment of homes, offices, schools, hospitals, roads, tunnels, bridges, locks, factories, and ship installations. With a mission to “make the future,” TBI aims to improve the quality of life, work, and mobility for people by developing and realizing smart, sustainable, and future-proof solutions. TBI companies have expertise in the fields of engineering, construction, and infrastructure and are recognized as IT innovators across a range of industries, providing leadership and advice at a national level in their native Netherlands. To learn more about TBI visit tbi.nl.