This is a great plug-in that allows for a technical drawing of your model. You can then use either the “Screencapturetoclipboard”, “Screencapturetofile”, or print function to grab a copy of what you see in your active viewport. I personally prefer to use the print function so you have a little more control of what you are outputting, e.g., resolution, line scale thickness, etc. After you have opened the print in Photoshop or whatever image editing software you use, you can use it as a great underlay for illustrations, explanatory drawings and whatnot.
This free plug-in for Rhinoceros can be downloaded here: Technical Drawing
How to install a plug-in in Rhino – https://polyplane.com/installing-rhino-plug-ins/
In other news, thanks so much to LifeHacker for hosting the five day Night School Series which mirrored the Preflight section. What a week!
If you get stuck installing a plug-in, you can visit this quick guide as a reference.
Hey, thanks for the video. it was a great.
I downloaded and installed the Technical Drawing plugin as you said, however I had saved it on my desktop. So after I installed it I moved it to the plugins folder in Rhinoceros 4.0. Since then it still shows up as an option on my views dropdown menu, but it doesn’t work.
I tried reinstalling it, from its new location. but it still dint work.
Any ideas on how I can resolve this?
thanks.
Hi Sanket! Thanks so much for enjoying the site. It’s a strange coincidence about the plug-in as I had this same issue today while working on a project. Unfortunately a drawback of the plug-in is that it needs to stay in the directory from which you installed it for it to work. Doubling down with the fact that you can’t uninstall a plug-in once you’ve installed it. Why this hasn’t been resolved is completely beyond me. Some plug-ins (such as T-Splines) offer an install/uninstall module to deal with this. Your best bet is to find out where the plug-in is registered in your computer’s registry and delete the key. If you open the plug-ins windo within rhino and right click on the plug-in, you can get property information about it and where it is registered. Once you remove that, you should be able to reinstall the plug-in from the new location. Sorry for the super long answer, but I know how frustrating that can be. Lucky for you, Rhino 5 comes with the tech-line view preinstalled. 🙂 I hope this helps.
-G
Hey, can u refresh the link for downloading please?
Hi Bo!
With Rhino 5, you don’t need to download this as it is part of the available view settings. Just right click on your viewport and select either “Pen” or “Technical”. If you are running Rhino 4, let me know and I’ll see if I can track this down for you.
-Gabe