Connect Rhino Geometry to Blender

Overview

Blender and Rhino are both very powerful programs but each are suited for different tasks. While Rhino’s features make it better for architectural, product design, Blender is better suited for animation, rendering and much more. In this tutorial, we’ll cover working seamlessly between Rhino and Blender using Speckle.

Let’s go🏃‍♂️💨

Prefer watching? Here is a video 📽

Tutorial Files

You can download the Blender file and Grasshopper definition used in this tutorial from here 👇:

Pavilion

Grasshopper definition

Pre-requisites

To follow this tutorial you'll need the following:

Speckle Account (you can get one for free🎉 at https://speckle.xyz/)
🦏 Rhino Connector (install it via Manager)
🔸 Blender Connector (install it via Manager)

Since we are using Rhino and Blender to achieve the workflow, you need to have the basic knowledge of how to use both solutions😇

Grasshopper Plugins

When it comes to Grasshopper plugins, Human and Elefront needed. Details to that👇:

Installing Connectors

Installing connectors is the first step and it is as simple as finding them in the list of available connectors in Speckle Manager and clicking “Install”.

Rhino Connector 🦏

Blender Connector 🔸

Rhino

Creating Geometry via Grasshopper

We are using Grasshopper to programmatically create the pavilion geometry inside Rhino. Material applied is created using Human plugin and baked into Rhino via Elefront. While baking, don’t forget to give it a name. This way, Elefront will keep track of the geometry and everytime you bake into Rhino, it’ll delete the old ones.

::: tip
📌 Materials in breps are not supported atm. So don’t forget to convert your geometry into meshes before sending into Speckleverse if you want to send with materials.
:::

Sending from Rhino

Lets start by opening the Speckle connector. You can do this by clicking the Speckle button on the toolbar or by running the Speckle command.
Once the UI panel is open, go ahead and select the stream you’d like to send data to.
Make sure you are on the Send mode and Everything is selected.
Finally, press the Send button.

Blender

Enable Speckle Connector

If this is your first time using the Speckle connector, you might need to enable it first.

Go to Edit > Preferences > Add-Ons.
Search for Speckle
Enable the SpeckleBlender 2.0

Speckle will be available on the sidepanel. To activate it, type N in your keyboard.

Receive Geometry from Speckle

Once you enable Speckle connector, your accounts, associated streams and commits will be visible.

Select the stream you send the Rhino geometry to. I used Rhino2Blender stream for that.
Select the branch used. I used main branch.
Let’s receive the latest commit made to this branch.
Click on Receive button.

Edit Received Material

Received geometry contains the materials applied in Rhino. You can check this by selecting an object, go to Materials panel.

We used Pavilion.Wood in our case which we created via Grasshopper. We set a brownish color for it and that is also present in the received geometry inside Blender.

Let’s replace this boring material with a PBR material. There are many PBR material resources online. We used this Plywood material from Polyhaven.

Open Shader Editor.
Select Principled BSDF.
Type Ctrl+Shift+T from your keyboard.

::: tip
📌 You should enable Node Wrangler from Add-Ons menu for this👆 to work.
:::

Select material maps you want to apply and set Principled Texture Setup.

Update Blender from Rhino

Let’s see whether if Blender connector keeps track of the Rhino geometry.

Make changes to geometry in Rhino and make another Send into Speckleverse.
Click Receive in Blender and witness the magic🧙‍♂️.

As you can see, Speckle updates the Blender geometry and preserves the applied material settings.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it useful!

Speckle is an Open Source project and we really ❤️ feedback, so if you have any questions, comments, critiques, or praises please let us know on our community forum.