Hi McNeel team,
I hope you all had a nice holiday and are back to work with some fresh energy to get Rhino V8 ready for professional use for the rest of us who are still using V7.
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And this is what I came here to inquire about. I bought upgrades to Rhino V8 in November 2023, and now, 14 months later, I’m still hesitant to move to V8.
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I’ve been following Brian’s service release candidate notes for V8, and based on how many basic broken things I continue to see reported as just fixed in very recent service releases, I’m wondering how many more are still not fixed.
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I also follow here several post of Rhino for Windows users with some everyday problems, limitations, and regressions they encounter frequently, and if I recall correctly, last week someone was still having custom toolbars with lost icons!
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I don’t want this to be a bitching post, but rather a very constructive and specific call for prioritization of my main concerns that so far that have stopped me from using V8.
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So here it goes:
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1. Overall Stability:
We run V7 all day, and we have practically no crashes. Maybe one crash every 2-3 weeks or so. Is V8 anywhere near that level of stability? We all use powerful PCs with 128 Gg ram and decent Nvidia cards, like 3080/3090/4090.
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2.Stable, Self-updatable, multi PC custom workspace.
Access to a reliable and easy-to-understand custom workspace without a single important regression from V7 is a must. We need the following things working in V8, in the same way or better than they are working in V7 today:
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2A: It must never ruin, garble or delete any content of my toolbars, my buttons, its icons, or the macros inside.
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2B: I need to have the ability to save a file that I can store/sync in Dropbox and read that file with my custom workspace and toolbars in my 2 PCs. And I need to be able to make any changes to my workspace in my main desktop (PC1), Close Rhino, autosave the changes, sync to Dropbox automatically, and when I later open my laptop (PC2), and as long as I’m online (Dropbox is set to always sync the workspace file), when I launch Rhino in PC2, I see the updated workspace with the changes I had made in PC1.
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2C: I need to be able to a collection of toolbars that I share with my team, let’s call it “Fresco_toolbars_v1_250113.rui” and anyone in my team can have that toolbar collection open, along with their own toolbars and other custom workspaces. If I update Fresco_toolbars_v1_250113.rui, they can see the updates. If any of us mis-edits it by mistake, we can always replace it by a saved backup verison (saved somewhere else) and we are all back to the good old “Fresco_toolbars_v1_250113.rui” before someone changed it.
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3. Flawless work on layers/properties palettes. No weird display glitches, names/properties not updating, layer dragging not working, etc. Everything should work as well as it does in V7
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4.No import/export issues with .step, pdf, ai, STl, OBJ, FBX.
Everything should work as well as it does in V7.
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5. Display/Viewmode errors.
V7 has some glitches in this regard, but they are minor; V8 should be at least as good as V7, not more glitchy.
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6.Viewport performance.
We run very frequently very massive files, so we cannot accept any FPS performance hit compared to V7. V7 is not great in terms of viewport performance, but it’s very acceptable (except when using BPR shaders). Is V8 viewport performance at least as good as V7?
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I understand that for many here, the current state of V8 might be great for your needs/expectations, and that’s excellent! but for us these 6 points above (please note point #2 has 2A, 2B, and 2C sub-points) are table stakes.
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I think I’ve been very patient but after being excluded from the entire V8 WIP cycle by not having a usable enough WIP/Beta to provide feedback, and followed by now 14 months of owning a pool of licenses of a product that still seems to be a major setback for daily productivity compared to V7, I’m starting to lose hope.
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Can someone at McNeel with knowledge, care, and motivation to address these issues listed please chime in?
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Thanks,
Gustavo