Send Rhino files

- [Instructor] In this video we cover how to send out Rhino files whether it's by email, FTP, sharing sites like Dropbox or even good old fashion physical media like a flash drive. However you share your files it's important to keep the file size to a minimum, not to mention sending out the correct Rhino file. So, what I mean by that correct Rhino file, well you'd be surprised. There's actually several other file types that Rhino's using at the same time. They're typically in the background but you can accidentally grab one of these if you're not careful.

Let's check them out by going to Tools, Options, and under Files right here we can see that there is a backup file which can be saved. I've turned mine off, but the format is 3DM.BAK There's also a Lock file that's extension RHL and that prevents people from opening the file that you're working on currently. But, we're going to be focused on the .3DM which is the Rhino data file. You should know the name and where it is.

As soon as you go to File, Save you'll be giving it a name and location anyway. So there should be no confusion the name and location. Right now we're going cover three different ways to correctly save the file and optimize it. Starting with Case A, let's hit OK to close this. Case A is going Save Small which will get rid of what's called the display mesh. Now if you look at the perspective window it is shaded compared to the view port right below which is wire frame and most people don't realize the shading takes up space in the file.

But if we were to get rid of the shading it's not a big deal. Whoever opens up the file next there's just a short delay and then the shading or mesh is recreated in just a few seconds. So it's a really handy way to save a ton of file size. Let's try that out. We're going to go to File, Save As, now I'm working on Lesson 02-01 So, I'm just going to select this option here Save Small, we're not going to change anything else, although you can change some other file formats we're not going to do that.

We just want to send out Rhino files. I'm going to go ahead and add an extension here so I can tell the difference. I'm going to type in ss for Save Small go ahead and click Save. Then we'll check out the difference in file sizes. Okay, looking into the exercise file folder the original file which was Lesson 02-01 was almost 20 megabytes and yet by doing that simple Save Small option it's under seven megabytes, so we've actually lost about two thirds the file size.

Pretty impressive. In every case we're going to be talking about I always recommend zipping the file if you're sending it out and that's easy enough to do just by right clicking, hitting the Zip option on your computer, and okay I'm just going to accept all the defaults so what's really beautiful about this is our original file was 20 megabytes, Save Small got it down to seven and then zipping got it down to four. So this is just way more send friendly if you're sending this out.

So that last step by zipping I recommend for any of the three cases we're going to be talking about. Let's go ahead and talk about this second case or Case B. This is where we're going to send out portions of the file. You may not realize it but when we Saved Small we still included all of the layers even if they're turned off and objects that were hidden. This time we're going to send out a very small set of data and it's just the stuff we pick. I'm going to maximize perspective here.

I'm just going to briefly note we've got layers that include a penguin on there and also storage objects, things I made along the way. We don't need to send those out. We can turn off titles and texts. We can turn off the axis. We can even turn of the curves if we're going to send this out for prototyping. A lot of times you just want to send out the geometry only depending on who's going to receive the file. This process requires us to go File, Export, this is the difference it's not a Save As.

We're going to Export, select it, you can hit Control A or just draw a box around the stuff you can see. Right click. This give us an option to, again, Save Small and then we'd probably zip it as well. I'm not going to do that. We're just going to cancel out. You got the basic idea here. By using this Export we're able to send out a smaller subset of just the layers and geometry we want. For the final case or Case C, I'll turn back a few more things so we can have stuff to look at here.

This is not as common but it can really save your bacon in some instances. What we're going to do is access a command that is not really obvious and is kind of hidden away. We're going to do this Save As but some of these extra options are accessed by typing it in with a special character. So I'm going to type in hyphen, Save As, now we get to kind of a different interface and here's some of the stuff we had done before. We can actually change the version number of Rhino back to version four, three or two.

There's our Save Small option. But for this final case I want to point your attention to this Save Plugin Data. Every once in a while you'll send a file out and people will report hey I don't have V-Ray or Bongo or some plugin and I'm getting some weird messages. This lets you turn off all plugin data and only send out a clean, pure Rhino file. Don't forget that you can change the version and you probably want to do the Save Small. I'm just going to escape out of that but that is the third and final way to saving Rhino files and sharing them with others.

This whole process is actually very simple but it's critical for collaborating with team members, your boss, your instructor, and any third party. Just make sure you get them the right .3DM file and then zip it to save size.