Workshop3 Report

RhinoCeros 4.0Chair Design

Vincent Sontani | ARCH380 | Summer 2011 | Rob Corser | Workshop 3

What is Rhinoceros 3D?

Rhinoceros 3D, widely known as Rhino, is basically a stand-alone, commercial NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational Basis Splines)-based 3-D modeling program that is developed by Robert McNeel & Associates. Nowadays, Rhino is commonly used by architects, industrial designer, jewelery designer, graphic desiner, and many others. This powerful NURBS based program can easily create, edit, analyze, and translate curves, surfaces, and solids. The program is constantly developed until now and there are also plugins available that makes Rhino stronger and smarter, such as Grasshopper and Flamingo.

For this workshop, I was given the task to make a chair model using this program. Following are the step by step process in creating the chair model.

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In order to make the chair, I decided to firstly make the wireframe for both the chair surface and the chair stand. There are so many ways that can be taken to make the wireframe, the easiest and most obvious one is to just make a series of polylines and then join them together.

As for myself, I firstly create a guideline for the chair dimension, using rectangular tool. Following the size guideline, I use both polyline tool and the curve tool to create the wireframe. Then, to smoothen some of the edges, I used the fillet curve tool. The separate lines can be joined together easily using the move and osnap tool at the same time. When the wireframe is finished, I combine all the line together using the join tool.

The use of layer is essential in this process. I use different layers to create different wireframes so that I can easily choose which one to use later.

Wireframe

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Sweep Loft

The next step on the design process is to make surfaces from the chair wireframe that is already created before. There are so many tools that can be used to create interesting surfaces. Some of them include the sweep tool, loft tool, rail revolve tool, patch tool, etc. For this project, I decide to use the sweep tool, which exactly follows the path created in the wireframe before. Out of the same wireframe, different surface can be created. The picture above shows two different surfaces that I created from the same wireframe. Once again, the use of layer is important as you can use different layers to store different surfaces and then just hide the unwanted ones later. Once the surface is created, the control point becomes a very helpful tool if you want to change the shape of the surfaces.

Surfaces

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Solids

After creating the surface and wireframe, the next step is to convert it into a solid. As for the chair surface, it is pretty simple to convert it to a solid. There are again so many tools available in order to convert it, including the extrude surface tool, extrude planar curve tool, boss, rib and many other. The simplest and easiest way is to just extrude the surface in a straight direction, vertically or horizontally, this tool will just directly stretch the surface to a solid. In my chair, I use the extrude surface along curve tool in which the solid created will follow another offset curve that we created. To smoothen the edges of the chair solid, I use the fillet edge tool.

To create the chair stand it is fairly simple as we already have the wireframe, which take much longer to create. To make the wireframe a solid, I just use the pipe tool, which directly convert the lines to a cylindrical volume. However, doing this has its own disadvantages as not all the lines are connected correctly and there will be some excess volumes. To correct this problem, I combine all the pipes, using the boolean union tool and then deleting the excess curve using the split tool.

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2D Drawings

In Rhino, once you generate the 3D drawings, you can easily generate the 2D drawings of that object by using the Make2D tool. The Make2D tool will automatically generate the 2D view of the viewport at the time you use the tool. You can then export the 2D drawings and then able to edit it in another program such as Adobe Illustrator. One disadvantage of this tool is that, sometimes there are lines that are missing and you have to fix it youself in Illustrator or directly in Rhino.

Top

Front

Perspective

Right

Axonometric

In Rhinoceros, you are able to directly render the object that you made. For me, this built in rendering feature is a bid advantage for the overall program. The render quality itself is not bad at all. We can give lighting to the object, so it feels just like photographing something. We can choose from an array of lighting options, including making a spotlight, direct light and even rectangular light screens. We can adjust the light intensity in each lighting object created, it can also be turned on or off easily at will. However, I also found one disadvantage of using this feature, in which we can't give materiality to the object, we can only give color, gloss and transparency.

3D Renderings

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2nd Chair Rendering

Repeating the steps from the beginning, I created another chair. This time, the chair stand is more rectangular and simpler, compared to the complex triangular shape of the previous chair. The chair surface is created using the same wireframe as the previous one, but is generated using the loft tool, instead of sweep.

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Rhinoceros is a very powerful program that can be used to create a high graphic 3D models easily. My experience of using the Rhino program has been really challenging and fun at the same time. There's so many advantages to this program, including the easiness to make wireframes and converting it to solid, the convenient rendering features and so many things. I believe that this program will be a big key for me in learning architecture and I really am keen to learn more about Rhino in the future.

Conclusion

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