Reviewing the project scope - Rhino Tutorial

- [Instructor] Before we start this course, let's jump ahead and take a tour of the finished model and outline some of the project strategies. Now, it's always a good idea to, first organize your file and settings before building any geometry. So, as we zoom around here, you might recognize this building from the prior course. This is the Zoomerang Pavilion, otherwise known as, the International Center of Penguin Studies, so you may notice a few penguins loitering around from time to time. However, most of this course will be focused on the new accounting wing over here. And in this new building, we're gonna have many examples of walls, doors, and window openings to explore. However, the exterior curtain wall that you see here, that was pretty much covered in the prior course, so we will be focusing on a lot of the stuff inside. And one thing I do want to check here, we're gonna zoom back out, so make sure in your Perspective Viewport, nothing is selected. You can do that by clicking somewhere with nothing in it. I'm gonna go ahead and change the camera lens length here in the Properties, under View and we'll just switch from the default 50 to about 30, just type in 30. Now, it looks like the camera jumps back, but it actually doesn't, it just got wider. And I think that'll give us a much better feedback and three dimensional feel of this object and geometry. Okay, let's go into some options and check the settings. We're gonna find it under Tools, Options here. First thing we always want to check is the units. So, in this file it's already set up as Feet, with three decimal places of accuracy. That's the template called Feet Small Objects. That's where we get a lot of these settings from. The next thing I wanna check is the Modeling Aids, so we're gonna open up this and check on the Nudge. Now, by default, Rhino has all of the nudging performed by the Alt + arrow keys. Those are the four cursor buttons on your keyboard. Instead, we're gonna switch this to just the cursor keys or arrows. And this makes it very similar to all the Adobe apps, like Photoshop and Illustrator, where we can move things around just by clicking up, down, left or right. It's a lot more intuitive and it's actually very useful in 3D. Now, the other thing I wanna check here is on the Nudge steps. When you move something with just the nudging alone, it's a single foot, which is great. Also the Shift + Nudge will move it further, or about 10 feet, I recommend. However, here in the Ctrl + Nudge, typically in the other Adobe apps I mentioned, it's gonna be a smaller amount. Instead of a 0.1 feet, which is just of a random number, I recommend that we type in 0.0833 If you recognize that number, it's exactly one inch, or about 8% of a foot. Okay, let's go check the grid next. So the grid size doesn't really matter, the most important thing here is we typically want to have the Minor grid lines equal to the units of the file. So, it's easier to count and gauge the size of stuff as we build them. The reason we have the Minor lines equal to the Snap spacing, is so, when drawing or moving, things will snap exactly to the grid and not some random place in-between. So, always make sure that your Minor grid lines are equal to the Snap spacing, no matter what those two numbers are, they should be the same. Now, we already changed the camera lens for the viewport but the next time we go to the viewport, we can have it set to 30 millimeters every time, so let's change that right here, under View, there's the default 50, I'm gonna type in three zero for 30. And that should do it for the basic settings of any file you start off. I clicked OK to close. I'm gonna zoom out here just a little bit. Something you're gonna love in this course, is my guides and custom construction planes. We'll talk about these in detail, but they're on a separate layer. And you'll see these guys off to the side and I've kept them all in blue, just so they kind of highlight from the rest of the geometry. So, they not only include some axis lines but also some labels as far as what floor they're on. And if you zoom in, it'll give you some of the dimensions from the floor-to-floor or floor-to-ceiling. Finally, one thing you might note, is our layer structure to help keep organized, I'm keeping this building with just three basic layers. One is the envelope, so we turn that off, you'll be able to see the two floors inside. For example, we can work on floor one by turning off floor two. Or go ahead and locking one of those layers if they're in the way. Another technique I'll be using, that you might notice that the floor is a little bit darker. And that's because the floors one and two are both locked. Since we have to draw a lot of geometry on each floor, it's way too easy to accidentally move the floor or delete the floors, so we've had it locked for almost all operations. And that's the reason they look a little bit darker in these viewports. I also found, by organizing the file in this manner, it's really gonna help us focus on the work and avoid some confusion along the way. You'll also notice, it should speed things up and help you make changes a lot easier. So as we get started, keep in mind, the design is an iterative process. It's much more back and forth than linear. The strategies in this course will help you master Rhino, but more importantly, help you get organized and efficient so all those changes are easier to make.