As you may know, the Rhino development project started nearly 20 years ago to provide marine designers with tools for building computer models that could be used to drive the digitally controlled fabrication equipment used in shipyards.

We continue to focus on the fact that designs are only useful once they are built and in the hands of consumers. With the cost of digital fabrication and 3D printing technology dropping quickly, more and more designers now have direct access to 3D digital fabrication equipment.

While we are not experts on all the many fabrication, manufacturing, or construction processes, we do focus on making sure that Rhino models can be accurate enough for and accessible to all the processes involved in a design becoming a reality.

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Capturing existing 3D data is often one of the first steps in a design project. Rhino has always directly supported both 3D digitizing hardware and 3D scanned point cloud data. Rhino now supports:

• Large point clouds. 3D scanners have become faster and cheaper, making huge scan files more common.
• Rhino’s 64-bit support and enhanced support for graphic co‑processors have made it possible to work with these large point clouds.
• LiDAR captures 3D terrain data for agriculture, archaeology, conservation, geology, land use planning, surveying, transportation, plus wind farm, solar farm, and cell tower deployment optimization. Rhino for Windows has robust support for plugins, such as RhinoTerrain™, that provide specialty tools for these new Rhino users.

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