Osprey

A dockable Rhino panel that gives you a live, layer-grouped, searchable view of every object in your model – with bidirectional selection sync between the panel and the 3D viewport. Built for production fab work on documents in the 10,000-object range.

What it does

• Layer-grouped tree of every object in the live document. Collapsible hierarchy. Expand/collapse state persists across rebuilds.
• Real-time search across name, layer, type, ID, and user-string values. Type-as-you-go.
• Filter by geometry type (brep, extrusion, curve, mesh, annotation, hatch, instance, text dot). Toggle on/off per type, or all/none.
• Click an item in the panel to select in the viewport. Click in the viewport to highlight in the panel. Shift-click for range, Ctrl-click for toggle. Click a layer label to select all descendants.
• Detail panel showing name, layer, type, bbox dimensions, all user-string metadata, and a copyable elephant_stable_id.
• Live update on every add, delete, rename, or layer change. No save required.

What it isn’t

• Not a PDM with check-in/check-out. If you need formal version control across an engineering team with locking and approval flow, Vault or Teamcenter cover that ground at very different price points.
• Not an editor. Osprey is read-only. It browses and selects but does not modify objects. For editing use Rhino’s normal UI.
• Not a multi-document browser. Single live .3dm only. A future standalone version will read Elephant sidecars to browse models without Rhino open, but that is not built yet.
• Not a parts library. It reads what is in your live document, not what could be in your project.

Why it exists

Production Rhino documents hit thousands of objects fast. Properties shows you one object at a time. Layers shows you containers, not contents. Osprey is the missing third panel: a fast, searchable, filterable index of everything in the document.

Battle-tested at Raider Boats on production aluminum boat models – 12,000 objects across a 380-layer hierarchy.

Install

1. In Rhino 8, type _PackageManager.
2. Toggle “Include pre-releases” in the search UI.
3. Search “osprey” and install the latest version.
4. Restart Rhino. Type _OspreyShow to open the panel.

Pairs with Elephant for durable identity that survives destructive operations like boolean and explode. Without Elephant, Osprey falls back to Rhino’s native GUIDs, which work for browse, select, and filter within a live session.

License

Free for personal and commercial use during beta. A paid tier with the standalone desktop app – browse models without opening Rhino – is on the roadmap. The Rhino plugin will remain free.

Support

Beta. Bugs and feature requests: file a GitHub issue, or email help@dfma.tools.