Building Rhino Plugin with AI
Learn how to build a fully functional custom image viewer panel for Rhino from scratch, using AI coding tools (Cursor and Visual Studio) to write and debug every line of C# code, even without any prior programming experience.
This mini course documents an honest, unscripted process of creating a real Rhino plugin using AI-assisted coding. Instructor Dusan Cvetkovic approaches it as a live experiment, building a custom Media Viewer panel directly inside Rhino using Cursor (an AI code editor) and Visual Studio, with the RhinoCommon SDK. Nothing is pre-recorded as perfect; the debugging loops, dead ends, and checkpoint restores are all part of the lesson.
By the end, you will have seen a working plugin go from zero lines of code to a deployable .rhp file that adds a dockable panel to Rhino. The panel lets you browse single images or entire folders, navigate between them with arrow controls, and switch between a dark and light background theme. You also see how to version the code with Git, how to create and embed plugin icons, and how to publish metadata visible inside Rhino's Plugin Manager.
- How to set up a Rhino plugin project in Visual Studio using the RhinoCommon SDK (.NET, C#)
- How to use Cursor (AI code editor) to generate, iterate, and debug plugin code without writing it manually
- How to create a dockable panel in Rhino with a custom WinForms-based UI
- How to load and display images from a single file path or an entire folder
- How to implement previous/next arrow navigation with hover-show/hover-hide behavior
- How to handle build errors iteratively by feeding Cursor the exact compiler output
- How to use Git (commit, checkpoint, restore) to safely roll back broken builds
- How to build and install the compiled .rhp file into Rhino 8
