Send Rhino files - Rhino Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video we cover how to send out Rhino files, whether it's by e-mail, FTP, sharing sites like Dropbox, or even good old-fashioned 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 is 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 .3dm, which is the Rhino data file. And you should know the name and where it is, as soon as you go to File, Save, you'll be giving a name and location anyway, So, there should be no confusion, the name and location. So, right now, we're going to cover three different ways to correctly save the file, and optimize it, starting with case A. Hit OK to close this. Case A is going to 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 viewport right below, which is wireframe. 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. 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 to 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. And 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 just 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 way more sender 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. Want to maximize perspective here. I'm just going to briefly note, we've got layers that include the 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 & TEXT, we can turn off the axis, we'd even turn off the curves, if we're going to send this out for prototyping. So, a lot of times you just want to send out the geometry only, depending on who's going to receive the file. Okay so, 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 CTRL-A or just draw a box around the stuff you can see. Right-click. So, this gives 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. So, 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, it's kind of hidden away. So, we're going to do the 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 -SaveAs. 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 the SavePluginData. 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." So, this lets you turn off all the plugin data, and only send out a clean, pure Rhino file. Okay so, 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. So, 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.