My fingers are not crossed for these - but I thought I’d put them out there anyways.
And you should know - I’m a casual and intermittent Rhino user so if some of these functions are currently available in Rhino, please point me in the right direction.
Some other method than the ‘elevator’ mode for vertical lines. I find the click / Ctrl / click again to be unwieldy and, often, inaccurate. I zoom in and find the 2nd click has not snapped to the first. So I zoom in a lot to be sure and that means a slowdown in my workflow.
The ability to tell Rhino to only snap to geometry that’s visible on the screen, not to geometry on the other side of an object (or a mile away but in line with my cursor). I spend way too much time having to zoom in to an area to make sure I have snapped to the point I want, not to something else. The ability to see ‘through’ an object should, as the program is configured now, be an option of course, but not a limitation.
The ability to read surfaces. I’m working in another program right now and I have to position some extruded text (a company logo) on a surface. I draw a line from a corner of the text towards the surface and the software tells me when my line is perpendicular to the surface and then when I’ve touched the surface. That gives me a definite position to work to. I use surfaces a lot - to calculate positions in space. If I draw a line through a surface I’d like Rhino to know where the intersection between the two is and be able to snap to it.
2 points for a dimension. I’d like to be able to click on one point, then another point no matter where in space and have Rhino display a dimension between those two points without having to go into another viewport. It seems to me with all the data Rhino is calculating, the simple question of the distance between point A and point B on a straight line should be manageable (but then I’m a draftsman, not a programmer so that could be the hardest thing in the world to do and I wouldn’t know that).
Thanks for the reply.
Not sure about your first item (there is a button?) Maybe you could clarify?
And I’m aware that the distance reads out on the command line. I meant a dimension that would appear on screen and in print.
Not a button user myself but Mitch says there is one…
I’ve looked through my aliases and couldn’t find it there so I suppose “vline” is a built-in alias for Line > Vertical. (The same with vplane).
The ‘long’ story: if you enter the command “Line”, you have the “Vertical” option on the command line.
heh… yeah
that’s my biggest wish as well… it’s possible that people with a sketchup background get a bigger wtf with elevator mode as a means to go vertical compared to people that don’t use sketchup… Moi, imo, is even better than sketchup in this regard…
(@anybody-- draw a polyline in Moi and notice how easy it is to go on the Z axis)
fwiw, i do have that as a keystroke (cmmd-L for line… shift-cmmd-L for vertical line)… it’s ok but it still only works for drawing single vertical lines… there are plenty of other instances where the cursor could be a bit more intelligent wrt going vertical without requiring the user to manually signal the cursor to leave the Cplane.
So how do you want it to be oriented ? I could see this as a dot-like object that would exist in screen space only and always be oriented towards the viewer, but at certain angles this won’t be very readable (like dots are right now)…
Thanks for the button reply. Didn’t know that. Real helpful.
I was assuming the orientation would be limited to the current view (i.e. perpendicular to the current viewing angle) and, if the view altered, the dimension would have to be redone as well . A dimension that rotated with the viewer and was always perpendicular to the viewing angle would be great even if in some extreme situations it wasn’t readable.
yeah, face me (sketchup lingo) dimensions (and dots,text,etc) would be sweet to see in rhino… i wonder how it would work out with the viewports other than perspective though? i could imagine things getting sort of sloppy in right-view for instance… or, maybe they only face-me in the perspective view? or- each viewport can toggle the behavior?
I would think the technology is there - these would need to be screen-space objects like dots are now.
One would need to get the angle of the dimension in the view and “flatten” (project) it into screen space, then rotate transform the dot so that the text aligns with the dimension line. Same for the arrowheads. Remove the lozenge-shaped background of the dot and just leave the text. Have the text, arrowheads and linewidth as a user set “dimension style”…
