Default units should not be Inches

I’m using Wenatchee 2014-08-27 (523) on OSX 10.8.5 and I just got a completely illogical error. Rhino hanged an I couldn’t understand why. Then I realised that the memory usage was way above normal and I had recently changed the render resolution.

Turns out inches is the default unit when setting a custom resolution so my rendering became 1024 inches (73728 pixels) wide and thus the massive memory usage.

Who on earth would ever need anything rendered in inches? Can we please have pixels by default?

Well there are people who like to set the final size of their image and a DPI and have Rhino calculate the pixel values for them… What it SHOULD have (Windows as well) are interrelated boxes for pixels, linear dimensions, and dpi - when you change the value in one box it should automatically adjust the other boxes…

–Mitch

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ABSOLUTELY! McNeel may not have much influence over Windows, but they sure could have their own products work this way. What you suggest just makes too much sense. If screen real estate in the appropriate form is at too much of a premium for multiple text boxes, a mouseover on the one textbox could popup a list of units, allowing the user to select the units he wants to see. Even better might be to allow the user to scroll his mouse wheel over the text box and have the text box show the value in each of the available units successively. A click on the mouse wheel could set the units displayed.

And that is EXACTLY what is implemented currently. Please try it.

Right… I may be wrong, but what you’re saying that Rhino is mostly for graphic designers and not engineers?

To me being in Europe and all metric - checking for anything being in inches by default is a very foreign thought. How does this fly with NASA that now do everything in the metric system? I assume one could use Rhino for real spaceships? I’m probably dumb, but this just seems backwards.

J

The English (inch) system does happen to be “default” in the US… for most people. Some software packages do ask the user what default unit system you would like to have on installation. But most if not all of those don’t allow you to switch easily afterward as Rhino does.

–Mitch

I am thinking that the default units of this country should not be inches : |

Thanks for your thoughts.
Which country? :smile:

I, myself, am in favor of World Peace.

At the global auto company that I retired from the designers were world class talent and could work in any system of units the job required. Sometimes metric and english on the same day on the same job. They seemed to realize and accept that in the real world there are multiple systems of units and they needed to be able to handle them all. Somehow they managed to keep it all straight. It just wasn’t a big deal.

Hum…Could be Liberia or Myanmar…:wink:

Just to be clear here - I don’t mind there being support for any kind of measurements in the app. That is great. When it comes to defaults it is probably stupid of me to think that having a look at the OS settings would be wise instead of simply going with the US standard?

According to the Wikipedia entry on Metrification, it is only the US, Burma and Liberia that still don’t use the Metric system. I’m pretty sure it’s easy to detect these three countries?

Anyway - I initially thought that pixels would be the best measurement so I’m completely off on this topic…

I’d rather not have Rhino try and figure out what units I want as default depending on where I am in the world - in the same way that I am extremely annoyed when Google or other sites try and do me a favor by localizing my searches or translating my pages into French when I’m looking for something in English somewhere not near here…

I would rather the user get to chose the default units they want to work in - which is what Rhino does, it offers you a set of templates to choose from when you open a new file and you can choose a default you want to open when starting Rhino… It could, as a tiny improvement, ask you for a default template/units during the initial install process perhaps.

–Mitch

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That is not necessarily something that is country-dependant but industry-dependant.
You could be in the US and work in metric because you work on parts for an automobile manufacturer.
Or you could be in France and work in inches for an airplane landing gear…

I don’t mean to hijack this thread but.

[AIW, I am in USA, and we are so screwed, well we would be but we have to find the right fasteners. As I see it, we use SAE as if people in other countries would want to buy something with non-metric fasteners. Meanwhile it’s harder to find metric sized raw materials in this country, so if you want to sell something overseas, we’re at a disadvantage. Anyone overseas will gladly make SAE stuff for us, as long as long as it keeps us addicted to an antiquated measuring system, and we won’t be competing with them. The politicians don’t want to push metric, because they don’t want to be branded unAmerican. Everyone tells our designers/engineers people that you should have things made overseas. If you can actually make something here, they tell you that you should accept a service job instead. We are losing the last of our blue-collar manufacturing infrastructure here : (]

I’m old enough to remember the 70’s when Shell decided they wanted to be a pioneer and sell their gasoline in liters in the USA. They spent a lot of money changing all the pumps. A few months later, they had lost something like 20% of their sales volume. They quickly changed everything back to gallons and that was the last attempt made… It’s not just the politicians, it’s the general public. --Mitch