A "naive" user's plea

[MichaelM]

Jim, I don’t have a current project so I can’t give you a current problem. Simple stuff is generally not an issue, though I wasted 30 minutes not long ago having a trim fail until I moved the trimming plane by .0001 inch. It sure looked like it should have worked.

I was prompted to start this thread from seeing a recent thread

It boggles the mind that the same issues are still present over a decade later

I started with Rhino probably 15 years ago and fell in love with the command line aspect of it, but it drove me nuts when operations would fail for seemingly no reason and I grew tired of endlessly having to recreate geometry a slightly different way to get certain operations to work, mainly boolean or split/trim. Every few years I’ll pop back over to it, check out the demo, only to find the issue persisting if not getting worse, so I give up on the idea of buying the latest version and go back…

where someone who has been using Rhino for a decade or so was saying that he had ongoing issues, and someone offered a suggestion to use some command that he was unfamiliar with, which sounded like it resolved a large amount of the difficulty he was having.

If I read about someone who appears to be far more experienced and familiar with Rhino than I am having significant ongoing problems due to not being familiar with just one or two commands (that may be an obvious choice to someone else) then I start wondering how much hope I have of reducing my own “stuck” moments.

I mentioned the cylinder in response to your comment that I read as advising avoiding using those primitive solids. Perhaps I took your comment wrong.

I looked at a couple of schultzeworks videos on Youtube and they were helpful in that there is more explanation given for “why you should do it this way instead of that way” so I’ll look into his other offerings. The advice to make the objects overly large and then trim them back to get good intersections was new, I’ve generally tried to snap directly to other geometry, and maybe, as with my “move it .0001 inch” issue mentioned above that is creating problems for me when it only looks like I’ve got things properly placed.

Please don’t get me wrong, I generally like Rhino (since I keep paying to upgrade it and RhinoCAM and the software is not generating any income) and there are some things that it makes very easy (I like the PIPE command a lot for tube structures) but it does spike my frustration level sometimes.

I’ll spend some time investigating the other tutorial materials that have been mentioned. If I can get some more helpful practices as with the schultzework videos I’ll probably be able to reduce the frequency of feeling stuck.

thanks,
Michael