Rhino 7 has launched with its typical McNeel whisper campaign, although the brand has been quick to announce that the latest version is its ‘most significant upgrade’ in its history, over 2018’s Rhino 6.
New Sub-D modelling tools are the big news, primed for users new and old to create freeform organic shapes with quick editing ability.
Rhino states that unlike traditionally Sub-D objects, which are mesh-based and lend themselves well to more approximate types of modelling; Sub-D objects in Rhino 7 are ‘high precision’ spline-based surfaces that bring a new level of accuracy to the process of creating complex freeform shapes.
As ever, there’s lots of information and tutorials already available from the Rhino community, with some excellent video content summarised here.
This links nicely with the other new feature in Rhino 7, Quadmesh, which allows the user to create a quad mesh from existing surfaces, solids, meshes, or the new Sub-Ds.
Quadmesh allows for better results when rendering, producing animations, and can be useful for when undertaking CFD and FEA analysis on a part.
Additionally, Rhino 7 has improved its presentation tools, streamlining the workflow with a major update to the Rhino Render engine, meaning that the same look you get in your ray-traced viewport can be rendered without any changes. It has also added support for Physically-Based Rendering materials, a LayerBook command, and more.
Rhino states that the latest release has fixed ‘hundreds of bugs’, but has also added workflow improvements like Named Selections, Mold Making tools, a single-line font for engraving, and improved interoperation with third-party file formats.
While the UI remains practically identical, the display pipeline has been upgraded to match modern graphics hardware. In Rhino 7, some models will display significantly faster on both Windows and Mac, while several refinements to the Display Modes have been made.
