Rhinoceros 7 SubD: Makes "Water Tight" Modeling Easier with Plenty of Future Potentials for Designers

Rhinoceros 7 brings many new features, as the answers to many loyal users and professionals around the world who requested lists of features. There are tons of enhancements in modeling, drafting up to presentation improvements, as well as changing its support to Windows 8 and above. Sorry Windows 7 users, Rhinoceros 7 can not be installed to your machine with your preferred OS. I think it's time for Win 7 users to upgrade to Win 10, along with Rhinoceros 7. However, with the OS upgrade requirement, Rhino 7 gives offerings that many couldn't resist.

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So fortunate that I have 2 mobile workstations for my daily demands:

1. Lenovo P40 Yoga; a solid 14" mobile workstation with built-in wacom features and stylus, accompanied by Nvidia Quadro M500M as it's discrete graphics. This one carries Windows 10 by default.
2. HP Zbook Studio G3; a much faster 15" with 4K display mobile workstation equipped with Nvidia Quadro M1000M and Nvidia Tesla K10. It operates under Windows 7 (as a downgrade) without issue at all.

Based on the requirements of Rhinoceros 7, I guess each of you could simply guess which mobile workstation is having it installed. Yes, the Lenovo P40 Yoga. However, after using Rhino 7 for few months, I don't see any performance degradation, compared to Rino 6 on the same system. And this is a good thing, because many software requires much higher hardware after receiving an upgrade. 

Lenovo P40 Yoga Mobile Workstation

About SubD in Rhino 7
Many designers, want the freedom to experiments with any initial design. They can do it in Rhino 6 with NURBS and Surface modeling of course, and the use of Rhino gives them the accurate modeling as well. Then came Rhino 7 few months back with SubD modeling feature, not to replace the current modeling features, but more over to enrich and add more approach to what Rhino has been well known of.

SubD, according to Rhino's website, is a new geometry type that can create editable, highly accurate shapes. Unlike other geometry types, SubD combines free-form accuracy while still allowing very quick editing. This new geometry type is offering "push and pull" kind of workflow in order to shape the object, just like shaping a clay object, in realtime.

Even though it sounds like a tool for art or creative people, SubD objects in Rhino are also highly accurate and can easily be converted to manufacturable solids. Many objects such as mesh or scan data, can be converted into SubD objects, making it more intuitive and easier to edit. SubD object can be converted into NURBS as well, giving engineers to have total freedom to create as well as experiment.


SubD Basics​
To begin with SubD modeling, we could just simply start with SubD available objects like SubD box, plane, cone or cylinder.

Basic SubD Objects

Just as mentioned earlier, SubD workflow, involves many "push and pulls" of the sub-objects (points, edges, faces) of the base SubD object we deploy (could be full watertight SubD object like SubD plane, box, cone, cylinder, etc.). ​

Pushes and Pulls, Allow Us To Shape The Base Object

Moving to slightly deeper workflow with SubD. Many useful tools are provided in order to simplify as well as to keep the model accurate. For instance: SubD bevel, insert edge, insert point, mirror etc., will keep the productivity high on the SubD modeling journey. Of course it will require a bit of practice, but once you capture the approach and making it suitable for you, experimenting or even modeling with SubD will make you soar through it.

More SubD Commands Applied

Personal Challenge: Fairchild's A-10 Thunderbolt II 3D Printed Plane
After making myself familiar with SubD in Rhinoceros 7, I started to feel the urge to begin a new journey with it. I consider myself as a hobbyist in designing rc planes based on depron sheets, as well as designing fixed wing UAVs. I had never designed any rc plane or UAV, particularly for 3d printer to construct it. So, it's a brand new challenge for me.

After collecting some information on the web and motivating my self to do so, the choice of rc plane was set to the Fairchild's A-10 Thunderbolt II. A while ago, I came up with a design of A-10 depron rc parkjet which was a huge success and accepted by global communities as it copied the real A-10 as a scaled down parkjet from many engineering aspects. And I think it's time for me, to keep moving forward, with the passion rapidly flowing in a new journey using 3d printer.

Early Stage of A-10 SubD Modeling

It gave me a big surprise that designing using SubD is very efficient and highly productive. It took me less than 4 lazy hours to finally came up with the final model as I did it during the holiday and I didn't want to take away the precious time I had with my family. So, it was a bit like "multi-tasking" between hobby and family.

Final 3d model of A-10 Thunderbolt RC Plane for 3d printer construction

Wrap Up
​Rhino 7 SubD is proven to have its own strength and an excellent addition to Rhino's NURBS and Surface modeling. I feel the benefit of accurate modeling from the SubD too during this personal project as I could trim, extend as well as applying any other SubD modifying commands, in such freedom.

Through this short article, I do hope that it keeps on securing many of loyal Sentra Grafika Kompumedia's (SGK)  valuable Rhino customers as well as potential ones to see, that SGK's not just selling Rhinoceros. We are users of Rhino as well as Workstations, and these kind of common things between SGK and its customers could keep the communication open between all of us. We also conduct many online events since the beginning of this pandemic and will keep on enhancing the experience and turning them into valuable resources, with hope that it will add more benefits to SGK's current and potential customers who have been putting and would place their trust and investment to Rhinoceros.

For you who would like to request for information/quotation about Rhino, feel free to click HERE.