Explore new and upcoming Rhino tools for shaping surfaces, editing geometry, producing drawings and presenting designs. This guide brings the main changes together, based on McNeel's official new-feature overview. Feature availability depends on the Rhino release you use.

Freeform Modelling and Surface Quality

Patch can fill gaps with untrimmed surfaces matched to neighbouring geometry up to curvature continuity. For holes with five or more sides, it builds a MultiBlend from several untrimmed patches.

FilletEdge adds setback fillets for cleaner corners where several filleted edges meet. Surface fillets can continue across tangent faces, helping blends follow a sequence of connected surfaces.

Control points can move along their own U, V or normal directions directly in the viewport. Falloff-based editing lets surrounding geometry follow a change smoothly. Surface-analysis tools include customisable stripes and dots, alongside visual and numerical reports of position, tangency and curvature continuity across model edges.

Direct Modelling

PushPull works on several flat or curved faces at once, useful for changing wall thickness or repeating an edit across a facade. Adjacent faces can be inset as one region for details such as window reveals.

Angle edits can extend neighbouring faces to keep them connected, supporting changes such as adjusting a roof pitch.

SubD and Organic Shapes

SubD edges can be matched to surface edges, connecting freeform exploration with precise surrounding geometry. Closed curves can become soft, inflated shapes, and new edges can be cut into SubD or mesh faces by drawing lines across them.

Local U, V and normal movement and falloff controls give more control over the geometry surrounding a selected SubD vertex, edge or face.

Drafting and Drawing Production

Create plans, elevations and sections from a model and update them as the design changes. Layout details can have non-rectangular boundaries, giving more flexibility when arranging views on a sheet.

Reusable section styles apply to objects or layers. Editing a style updates the sections that use it, helping maintain consistency across drawing sets.

Other additions include complex linetypes containing text or shapes, parallel geometry drawn in a single stroke, custom hatch patterns, GD&T support and new text-formatting features. In-place annotations and redlines keep review comments connected to the model or drawing.

Visualisation and Presentation

A new concept display mode supports early design presentations. Decals can use full materials, including metallic and bump effects, while Rendered mode shows coloured transparency and refraction.

Rendering improvements also include light focusing through transparent objects and splitting into colours, providing more ways to present glass and other transparent materials.

Patterns and Repeated Geometry

Objects repeated along a curve gain viewport handles for spacing, scale and orientation. Objects can also be scaled around their own centres with random or gradient variation, useful for facade studies, product detailing and digital fabrication.

Larger Projects and Collaboration

McNeel highlights faster opening of large models and improved responsiveness when selecting objects, navigating heavy 2D drawings and switching to technical display modes.

Worksessions are available on Mac as well as Windows, with tools for attaching files, tracking locks and coordinating edits. Nested block editing lets you work within an assembly and step back out.

Group layouts by discipline, location or project status, then print or export them together. An interactive file-size map helps identify which objects and data occupy space in a 3dm file.

Grasshopper

Grasshopper gains closer integration with Rhino's documentation and presentation tools. Workflows include creating and editing render materials, working with clipping planes and sections, generating 2D drawings and controlling hatch patterns.

Viewport handles can drive a definition, allowing colleagues who work outside Grasshopper to explore design variations. Improved list selection and canvas content display support more accessible definitions.

McNeel also presents a next-generation Grasshopper environment as a ground-up rewrite, with parallel component processing, cancellable solutions, looping clusters and metadata carried with values.

Interface and Display

Interface developments include redesigned icons, a reworked command line shared across Windows and Mac, single-key command shortcuts and easier workspace sharing between computers and team members.

On Windows, a new Direct3D display pipeline broadens the platform options. See McNeel's system requirements for platform details.

RhinoAI and Development Tools

RhinoAI connects an AI assistant to an open Rhino and Grasshopper document, using the tools you allow. It can connect to an assistant you already use or a model running locally.

For developers, additions include a C++ SDK on Mac, Rhino.Compute on Linux, updated CPython and .NET support, plus improvements to the script editor and development APIs.

Explore the Features in Your Workflow

Visit McNeel's complete feature overview for demonstrations and detailed explanations. Try the tools on copies of representative projects to see how they support your modelling and drawing work.

For purchase options, use our Rhino buying guide. Existing owners can follow our Rhino upgrade guide for evaluation, compatibility checks and migration planning.

Rhino's plugin ecosystem extends the modelling and drafting tools described above. The plugin guides cover parametric structural analysis with Karamba3D, constraint-based surface generation with xNURBS, marine design tools in Nemo and an architectural content library in Savanna3D.