Featuring designers & design engineers, Astheimer Design, and the Rhino 3D developers themselves, McNeel & Associates.

Join the team from Simply Rhino live and online for our next Rhino 3D UK User group meeting on Thursday 20th May 2021. We are pleased to have two great presentations along with our usual live and interactive Q&A sessions.

  • This live online meeting took place on Thursday 20th May 2021
  • Time: 18:30 – 20:00 (UK Time)
  • The meeting was recorded and the video is shown following the presentation details below

Presenters & Presentation Details:

Presentation #1 – Astheimer Design – Delivering Mobility Solutions for a Sustainable* Future 

Founded in 2009 by Carsten Astheimer with Russell Gillott, the Astheimer team has grown into a multidisciplinary talented team of designers and design engineers enabling the design, development and build of road going vehicles, award winning boats, vertical take-off and landing aircraft, and more.

Carsten spent a large part of his career in Italy, the birthplace of automotive design, building and running one of the studios for Pininfarina, he then became design director for Brunswick, a multinational marine company where he met Russell now the design director at Astheimer. 


Photo of Carsten Astheimer the founder of Astheimer Design.

We’re delighted to be joined by Carsten Astheimer who will talk about Astheimer’s design principles and values and present ‘AURA’, an all-electric concept car designed for nature, with sustainability at its core and efficiency driving its design.


Located in Warwick, the heart of the UK automotive industry, Astheimer have built a world class team and state of the art hardware and software, allowing them to develop projects end to end, from the initial concept to fully road legal functional prototypes.

Astheimer have developed long term collaborative relationships with their clients, including Land Rover, Bentley, Rolls Royce, Nissan, Airstream, Caterpillar and many others, thanks to a personalised service and the design principals and values by which they operate.

* “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” United Nations 1987.

Image shows the design for an all-electric concept car called AURA, the sage-green, two-seater car is shown travelling along a road through a forest.
AURA image ©Astheimer Design

Presentation #2 – McNeel – Rhino 7, Design Possibilities

McNeel’s presentation will be delivered by Scott Davidson and Kyle Houchens.

The goal of the presentation is to showcase some of the new features of Rhino 7 and the possibilities they bring for design. The session will also demonstrate how users can apply these new tools to their workflows.

Image shows a concept racing car which is red coloured with black livery, designed using Rhino v7 including SubD.

Scott Davidson will introduce Rhino 7 and talk briefly about what’s new using images to help talk about the tech behind these new features.

Kyle Houchens will make a live Rhino 7 demo of a rapid concept build of a vehicle seat. If time allows Kyle will also talk about topology layout for a basic vehicle.

Part of Kyle’s live presentation will involve the new SubD toolset in Rhino v7.  This surfacing methodology allows for the easy creation and adjustment of freeform and organic forms that can sometimes be challenging to model using a conventional NURBS approach. Put simply, the designer is in control of the shape and form while Rhino v7 looks after the continuity.

Scott has handled business development at Robert McNeel & Associates since 1992, working directly with customers and development partners to help create market specific solutions. Scott is always searching for tools, techniques and technologies that may be helpful to the Rhino community and enjoys discovering the various ways people use Rhino.

Kyle is an application specialist, designer and modeller with 30-years experience in the automotive, toy, product and entertainment industries. Kyle has built thousands of 3D models (and counting) and specializes in digital product development, rendering, digital workflow design and training.

McNeel image modelling and design courtesy of Kyle Houchens of McNeel and Associates in Rhino v7.

Watch the full video recording of the meeting here:


Organised by Simply Rhino

Sponsored by BEAM and PNY


Read about our last meeting and watch the video recording of April’s Grasshopper UK User Group Meeting here.