Setting and fixing Rhino preferences - Rhino Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we cover my favorite Rhino options to tweak. Most of these are personal preferences, and will change with the kinds of projects you are working on. But there is one exception. The nudge. Let's fix that first and get it out of the way. We're gonna access this setting by going to the tools menu and selecting options. Now down here towards the bottom under modeling aides we have nudge, and by default, it will say alt + arrows. Why I don't like this is a lot of other software uses just the arrow keys to move things around in the scene. We'll do a demo of that in just a second, but I find that very handy and intuitive to move things up, down, left, right with those four arrow cursors. Since we're here, we may want to take a look at the nudge steps. So I always pick something logical, for example, if we nudge or move something, it should move one of the file units away. Just like Photoshop and Illustrator, control plus the arrow will move it a smaller amount and shift plus any of the arrows move it a larger amount. So these make a lot of sense to me, just because I'm used to them. Let's go ahead, hit okay. And I'll demonstrate why this can be really handy. I'm gonna zoom in to one of these landing gear feet. I'm gonna select this guy here and then hit Control + C and Control + V. Now I'm gonna hold down shift and the right arrow. So that moves ten. Now it's still on top of the other guy, so I'll hit it a couple more times. Maybe about five times, just to give it a little bit of space. Typically I'll make a couple extra copies, so let's do that again. Control + C, Control + V, and five more nudges to get it over to the side. Now why this works fantastically is I can make changes and not have to worry about getting back to the original or prior design. So let's say I spent some time modifying these with different radii on the corners. Maybe this was small, this was medium, this was large. At the end of this process, I decide well, this one here is the best. So what I can do is just delete these guys, select both, hit the delete key and this will move exactly back into position. So I'm gonna hit shift and then the left arrow until it lines right up with where it started. So for a lot of processes, using the nudge is super handy. Let's talk about some of the other options and where those are located. Fortunately it's all in one big spot. So we're gonna go back to tools, options, let's talk about these two different sections here. At the top we have document properties and at the bottom we have Rhino options. So a simple way to understand what's going on here is anything modified up here in document stays with the file. That means if you send this to somebody else their file will match exactly. They're not gonna be asking you, what are your units? This thing seems too large or small. It will be the perfect size. On the other hand, we have Rhino options. And these are settings that stay with your installation on your computer. Now this is great when you're working at home and it's your own personal computer. However, just be aware, if you're working on a work or a school computer where different people log in a lot of times these settings will get wiped out every time. So you don't want to spend too much time except if it's a really important setting, like the nudge. Since we're working in 3D, one thing I always modify is under view. And that is the default camera lens on a 3D view port or perspective view port. It will say 50 millimeters every time you launch the software if you don't make this change. I prefer 30 millimeters, that gives you a wider angle lens things seem more realistic and three dimensional. Another thing I like to change is the appearance and colors. Now the only reason we've got a white background is that I think that works better on mobile devices. And so I've got that changed right here at the top. And also the gridlines I made a little bit darker for this same reason. Speaking of colors, let's close this dialog here. Hit okay. And come over to the layer panel. I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating. I like to have all of my layers perfectly black so that they show up in gray. This is a powerful design tool, so colors do not distract me. Unless of course I need something to pop for a reference item. Like you see here with the red axis lines that I drew. So these customization options let you adapt Rhino to your work flow. But remember how these settings are saved. Changes in the document section are saved with the file. Changes in the Rhino section are saved to your computer which will remain if it's your own personal computer.