VL.Rhino - Rhino & Grasshopper for vvvv, now available

Hey everyone,

after maintaining VL.Rhino.3dm for a while, I’ve built out a full professional version. It’s available now: VL.Rhino.

Overview

Many of you probably know VL.Rhino.3dm for .3dm reading, no Rhino installation needed. VL.Rhino keeps that and adds a lot more to the workflow. It also comes with significantly improved geometry reading performance over the free version.

What’s new

One of the main additions is the Grasshopper Live-Link - bidirectional realtime communication between Grasshopper and vvvv via shared memory. Geometry, floats, vectors, and strings flow both ways.

Beyond that:

PBR material pipeline — Rhino materials → Stride, embedded textures extracted directly from the .3dm, no separate texture files needed
Camera & light export — named views and lights as Stride entities
Geometry creation — NURBS curves, surfaces, pipe and ribbon meshes from control points in vvvv
Blocks/Instances — GPU instancing via per-geometry transform matrices
User Strings & layer metadata — drive logic, filtering, and labeling directly from data embedded in your Rhino model
Rhino Compute integration — connect to a local or cloud Compute server from vvvv
Skia path conversion — Brep/Mesh/Curve edges → SKPath for 2D/UI contexts
Adaptive curve sampling — chord deviation, tangent angle, edge length, recursion depth

No Rhino installation required for any of the above. The Grasshopper Live-Link and Rhino.Compute are the only feature that need Rhino 7 or 8 running alongside.

Objects

The workflow idea behind it

In many studios there are two worlds: the designer working in Rhino, and the developer working in vvvv. VL.Rhino lets these two communicate properly. User Strings and layer hierarchies become the interface between disciplines - the 3D model carries not just geometry but meaning, usable in vvvv directly for filtering, logic, and interaction.