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
}

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