Creating a Skin (Windows)
Windows only

by Dale Fugier (Last updated:  Tuesday, April 13, 2021)

Overview

Rhino allows developers to customize most of Rhino’s interface so that the application appears to be their own. We call this a custom Skin. With a custom Skin, you can change the application icon, splash screen, the application name etc.

Creating a custom Skin for Rhino involves creating a custom skin assembly:

skin name.rhs This is a regular .NET Assembly (.DLL) that implements the skin’s icon, splash screen, application name, etc. In this guide, we will refer this to the Skin DLL. See a full list of methods and properties on the Skin class documentation.

Create the Skin DLL

To create the Skin DLL:

  1. Launch Visual Studio and add a new Class Library project to your solution.
  2. In the new Class Library project, add a reference to RhinoCommon.dll, which is found in Rhino’s System folder. Note: make sure, after adding the reference, to set the properties of the reference to Copy Local = False.
  3. Create a new class that inherits from Rhino.Runtime.Skin.
  4. Add a post build event to the project to rename the assembly from .dll to .rhs:
Copy "$(TargetPath)" "$(TargetDir)$(ProjectName).rhs"
Erase "$(TargetPath)"

Skin Class

The skin class can override basic properties, like the ApplicationName:

namespace MySkin
{
  public class MyHippoSkin : Rhino.Runtime.Skin
  {
    protected override string ApplicationName
    {
      get
      {
        return "Hippopotamus";
      }
    }
  }
  // You can override more methods and properties here
}

Namespace MySkin
    Public Class MyHippoSkin
        Inherits Rhino.Runtime.Skin
        Protected Overrides ReadOnly Property ApplicationName() As String
            Get
                Return "Hippopotamus"
            End Get
        End Property
    End Class
    ' You can override more methods and properties here
End Namespace

Installation

WARNING

Modifying the registry incorrectly can have negative consequences on your system's stability and even damage the system.

To install your custom Skin, use REGEDIT.EXE to add a scheme key to your registry with a path to your Skin DLL. For example:

Item Value
Subkey HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\McNeel\Rhinoceros\MajorVersion.0\Scheme: MySkin
Entry name SkinDLLPath
Type REG_SZ
Data value C:\Src\MySkin\Bin\Release\MySkin.rhs

Where MajorVersion is the major version of Rhino (e.g. 6, 7, 8).

Testing

You can now test your custom Skin by creating shortcut to your Rhino executable with /scheme="<scheme name from the previous step>" as command line argument. For example:

C:\Program Files\Rhino 8\System\Rhino.exe" /scheme=MySkin