Four Rhino Shortcuts That Skip the Menus

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Comment SHORTCUTS and here's the cheat sheet: Control Points, Join, Hide and Show, the four Rhino shortcuts from the video, with their Mac equivalents.

Four Rhino shortcuts that skip the menus

Clicking through the Edit menu to join two surfaces, or through Object Properties to hide a block of geometry, works, but it is three or four clicks for something that is one keystroke away. Four default Rhino shortcuts replace that clicking on the same model: Control Points On (F10), Join (Ctrl+J), Hide (Ctrl+H) and Show (Ctrl+Alt+H). This is the complete cheat sheet promised to anyone who commented SHORTCUTS on the video: the same four commands, what each one does, and the Mac key next to the Windows one.

All four come from McNeel's own Rhino 8 Help for Windows. On Mac, it is F10, Cmd+J, Cmd+Shift+I to hide and Cmd+Shift+J to show.

Control Points On (F10): edit the shape without opening a menu

F10 turns control points on for whatever curve, surface or polysurface is selected, on Windows and on Mac alike. Once the points are visible, dragging one reshapes the object directly instead of going through a dialog or rebuilding the geometry from scratch. It is the same toggle whether you are fine-tuning a single curve or adjusting a surface late in a model, so it is worth reaching for before redrawing anything.

Join (Ctrl+J): combine separate pieces into one object

Ctrl+J runs Join on Windows; Cmd+J does the same on Mac. Select the curves, surfaces or polysurfaces that belong together and Join merges them into a single object, which matters the moment that object needs to move, select or export as one piece instead of several. Modeling a shape in pieces and joining it at the end is often faster than trying to build it as one object from the first curve.

Hide (Ctrl+H) and Show (Ctrl+Alt+H): clear the view without deleting anything

Ctrl+H hides the current selection on Windows; Ctrl+Alt+H brings every hidden object back. On Mac the same two actions are Cmd+Shift+I and Cmd+Shift+J. Either way, hidden geometry stays in the file: it does not delete, and it still exports if Show never gets pressed before sending the file out. That makes Hide the fast way to clear a busy viewport while modeling a detail, as long as Show is the next habit, not an afterthought.

Where these four shortcuts come from, and how to change them

All four are the default key assignments in McNeel's own Rhino 8 Help for Windows, which also lists the Mac defaults and the rest of Rhino's shortcut set beyond these four. Any of them can be reassigned to a different key through the Keyboard page of Rhino's Options dialog; McNeel documents that Command Editor workflow on its Commands settings help page.

When a Rhino modeling backlog stops being a shortcuts problem

These four shortcuts save clicks on a model that one person is already modeling. They do not help when the real constraint is that a studio has more Rhino modeling than the people on staff can get through, which shows up as deadlines slipping on geometry work rather than on design decisions. That is when a Rhino modeling backlog stops being a shortcuts problem and starts being a staffing question; see what CAD and 3D modeling support looks like for architecture firms for how firms cover that gap, and four Revit shortcuts for placing walls exactly if the same studio also works in Revit.

Rhino's own user forum is also worth a look once the defaults aren't enough: McNeel's keyboard shortcuts thread covers how shortcut behavior and command options interact beyond these four.

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• Rhino shortcuts
• Rhino workflow
• 3D modeling