Command launching - Rhino Tutorial

- [Instructor] Next up we cover the various ways to launch commands you'll see how you can launch commands in more ways than you could guess. So go ahead and guess. If you guessed five you are right. If not feel free to guess again. Anyways, this flexibility gives you a lot of freedom, but it can also increase confusion for some beginners. We also have four different ways to repeat commands. Let's cover some of these right now. So launching a command, probably the most easiest or intuitive ways is that menu at the top. All commands are located there. But icons are sprinkled around the interface, and those can be very handy as well. You'll see those in the toolbar on the top and a lot of the panels on the side. We can also type in directly to the command line if we have trouble remembering where the command might be or we just like typing in a lot of letters. If you have a middle button mouse, which you should, then clicking that center button or wheel will pop up a small dialog box, which we can then add commands. We also have keyboard shortcuts. We're gonna save these last two for a little bit later. Now once you've finished a command it's really handy to repeat it. And you can do that several ways also. The quickest way is right-click on the mouse, and that will repeat the very last single command. Now this is important, we'll talk about why it is in just a second. Also, the exact same situation will be hitting the spacebar or the enter key. These three things are identical. So remember, you have to be outside of a command. That means, if you hit any of these three keys and your inside a command, you may get unexpected results. So make sure your outside of a command you could always do that if you hit escape, escape, if you're not 100% sure. And finally, if you have multiple commands and you wanna jump around, say for example, you're working on three or four commands back and forth you don't wanna repeat the last one, maybe the third one in the sequence. In that case I'll show you how to right-click on the command line and access the last 15, plus or minus, commands. Now that we're inside Rhino let's execute a couple different commands and see how this whole system works. I'm gonna zoom in here. We're gonna go ahead and launch a circle command using the menu. So that's under Curve, and we see Circle there pretty close to the top. I'm just gonna pick the very first one. I would like to snap it to that point. So just for a little extra practice make sure your Osnaps are turned on and not off. There is the on mode. And I'm gonna select point. That means I can snap exactly to the spot I want and we'll just draw a quick and easy circle. Pretty straightforward. That's the menu. Icons, as we've discussed, are pretty much everywhere in the interface. Let's go ahead and pick a polygon here. So that's using an icon. We'll do the same snap and just draw a five-sided polygon anywhere you want. Okay, moving along, let's use the command line. Let's say, for example, you forgot where the command was, and you know it's called an ellipse. So you can just type in E-L-L and pretty shortly you should see all the things that match. There is ellipse right at the top. I'm gonna do the same thing, just quickly draw a sample ellipse here. That looks great. Now we discussed the popup and the keyboard shortcut, which we'll cover later. But since we're here I just wanted to show you what you might see if you click your middle mouse button or wheel. This looks like a very small menu, but we'll be adding some commands to this in a later video. We also discussed repeating. And this is really important because a lot of people get confused. If I needed to get another ellipse, we discussed how we could click the right button, the spacebar, or the enter key. So I'm just gonna do that with the mouse. And you'll notice up in the command line I've started the ellipse command, and we can draw that anywhere we want or any size. Now this is the cool part. We talked about jumping around from multiple commands, not always repeating the last command, which doesn't happen all that often. So the command line is over here where we type in, but any blank spot will do. You're gonna right click. That now shows you the last group of commands. Typically by default this'll be at least 15, but you can also change that. Let's go back to the polygon, and just for the heck of it draw one more. One thing to watch out for is the problem with copy and paste and repeat. Let me show you what can happen. I'm gonna select this geometry here. I'm gonna use control c or command c on Mac. And then command v to paste. So I just made one copy right on top. Now let's say I'm doing some work later and hit the spacebar or the enter key, or both, or right click accidentally. Here's the problem, I just made about 10 copies. The way you spot these copies is by clicking on where there should be one and now you see we've got lots of extra copies. Do not try to delete them one at a time. Instead we're gonna go to a really nice command here. It's under the Edit menu. We're gonna go down to Select Objects. And we're gonna go to the very bottom of this menu, duplicate objects. Now it looks like one lit up. But if you happen to take a peek at the command line it's only picking all of them except one. So now I'm gonna hit the delete key, and if we double check here by clicking, there is only one left. That is really handy. So if you run into any problems, the best advice I can give is don't panic. Some of these commands are very powerful and can be easy to get confused. Here's my general list of very simple rules. First, undo. Then just simply restart the same command. Also, this time make sure you go a little bit slower. And finally, read the command line. Typically beginners will get mixed up because they're clicking or selecting at the wrong time.