Productivity

The Assistant panel

The panel is a conversation: your messages, the Assistant’s answers and, when a change needs your approval, the proposals it puts in front of you before it changes the document.

The controls

Message box — type in plain language. Enter sends, Shift + Enter starts a new line.
Send — sends the message. While the Assistant is working it becomes Stop, which aborts the request immediately.
Attach images — adds photos or sketches to your next message (JPG, PNG or WebP, up to six). You can also paste them with Ctrl + V or drop them on the message box; see Pictures.
Clear History — starts a new conversation. The Assistant forgets the thread and its pictures, and the copy kept with the file is deleted; your design is untouched.
Quick actions — a small menu of the most common requests, which pre-fill the message box so you can complete them: Price, Ring size…, Metal…, Report, Render view.
Help — opens this documentation.
Company standards — opens the file of rules your company always follows, which the Assistant applies when it builds; see Company standards.
Auto — the play button. On by default: changes run as soon as the Assistant makes them, except the ones that always wait for Apply (see below). Turn it off to review every change first with Apply and Cancel.
Cost — next to Auto, what the conversation has cost so far, as OpenRouter bills it (for example $0.12). Hover it for today’s total and your daily limit, if you set one in Assistant options.

How a turn works

You ask. Every message travels with a brief snapshot of the design you have open — its type, metals, ring size and layers — so the Assistant knows what “it” refers to without you explaining.
It reads what it needs. If the question requires more, the Assistant fetches it on its own: the full element list with parameters, the pricing breakdown, the Boutique data, a look at the viewport, or the RhinoArtisan documentation. A status bubble shows what it is doing, with a ✕ to cancel at any point.
It answers, or it acts. A question gets an answer, which appears word by word as the Assistant writes it. A request that changes the document runs straight away in Auto mode, and the Assistant closes the turn with a short summary of everything that changed. With Auto off, the change becomes a proposal card naming the exact command and its arguments, with Apply and Cancel.
You stay in control. Apply runs the command on the real model and the Assistant continues from the result — so “resize it and tell me the new weight” works as one turn — while Cancel drops it and nothing is executed. And whatever the mode, an answer that changed the design ends with an Undo button: see Undo a whole answer.

Undo a whole answer

A request like “build a solitaire with a halo” can take several steps, and each step is its own Rhino undo. So every answer that changed the design ends with a button — Undo these 5 changes, or Undo this change — that reverts everything that answer did in one go, including proposals you applied. The Assistant is told, so the conversation carries on from the design as it is.

The button only undoes what the answer itself did. If the design changed in between — you edited it while the Assistant was working, used Rhino’s Undo, or asked for something else since — it explains why it can’t and leaves the design alone; Rhino’s own Undo still works step by step.

Pictures

Attach a photo, a sketch or a screenshot and talk about it: “what setting is this?”, “make something like this with a 1 ct oval”. The Assistant looks at each image when you send it and keeps what it saw for the rest of the conversation, so follow-ups don’t send the picture again. Before building from a picture it tells you its plan and waits for your go-ahead.

You can also ask it for a picture: “make a photorealistic render of this ring”, “show it on a hand”, or a variation of an image you attached. Images are generated with your fal.ai key and appear in the conversation; click one to open it. See What you can ask.

The conversation keeps its context

Follow-ups work the way they do with a person: “and in yellow gold?”, “make it half a size bigger”, “I don’t like it”. The Assistant carries the thread until you clear it, so you can refine a result instead of restating the whole request.

You can also chain several instructions in one message — “prepare the design for production, add the dimensions and make a report using Customer A” — and they run in the right order (one proposal at a time with Auto off).

Each saved file keeps its conversation. Close Rhino, open the file tomorrow, and the chat is there to carry on: a gray note above the message box says when it was kept. Only the text comes back — not the pictures, and not the Undo buttons, because Rhino’s undo history doesn’t survive closing either. The conversation is stored on your computer, in your user folder, never inside the .3dm, so it doesn’t travel with files you send to customers or workshops. A file you haven’t saved yet keeps its chat from the moment you save it. You can turn this off in Assistant options.

When something goes wrong

An error bubble carries the message from the model or from the command that failed. The most common one is a missing or exhausted OpenRouter key — see Setting Up the Assistant.
“The Assistant has reached today’s AI spending limit” means the daily limit in Assistant options has been reached: raise it there, or carry on tomorrow.
A command that could not run reports back in the conversation, and the Assistant explains what it needs — often a design element that does not exist in the current model.
Nothing happening usually means no design is open: the Assistant reads the active document, so an empty Rhino gives it nothing to work with.