Rhino 5 introduced a new license validation system aimed to makes it easier to recover lost or stolen license keys. License validation associates your license with your email address (or email domain in the case of a Lab License) and, for upgrade licenses, your previous license key.

The Rhino license agreement lets you have Rhino installed simultaneously on multiple computers so long as the license is in use on only one computer at a time.

The validation system lets you install your license on multiple computers, so long as you validate your license with the same information each time.

When you upgrade Rhino from a previous version, license validation associates the license from your previous version of Rhino with the license you are upgrading to. A previous version license can only be used to upgrade one Rhino 5 license. For example, a company owns four licenses of Rhino 4 and and wants to upgrade to Rhino 5. Each upgrade installation should be associated with a different Rhino 4 license for validation to succeed.

After installing Rhino, you have a 30-day grace period to complete the validation process.

Rhino will display the License Validation Wizard. Follow the instructions on the screen to validate your license.

If you receive an error during license validation, please contact McNeel Technical Support for help. Please include the error description when you contact support.

If your computer is not connected to the internet, the License Validation Wizard instructs you on how to validate using a web browser on another computer. The process looks like this:

1. Visit the validation web site given by Rhino.
2. Enter your email address and license key.
3. If required, enter a license key for a previous version of Rhino.
4. A validation code will be displayed. Print or write down your validation code.
5. Return to the computer that does not have an internet connection.
   • The computer must be off the internet for the offline validation to work. Disconnect from wireless or unplug cable, and proceed to step 7.
6. Start Rhino 5.
7. Enter your validation code in the Validation Wizard and click Next.

Rhino will now be successfully validated offline.

In a stand-alone Rhino installation (commercial, educational, or educational lab), the validation is tied to a specific computer.

When you image a computer and push the image to a new computer, Rhino requires validation on that new computer.

This can be problematic. So to solve this issue, consider the following options:

1. (Recommended) Use the free Zoo floating license manager on a server to manage and validate the Lab License key once. Deploy Rhino as a Network Install to the computer being set up as the disk image. Then you can push a properly configured disk image to all computers.
2. Start Rhino as an local Admin on each system. You need to login as a local administrator on the computers that were imaged, through the license Validation process on each computer. This is time consuming and not recommended unless recreating the image with the serial number of the hard drive is not an option.