Very much so. I am putting a large focus into documentation and the first user experience. My goal is you can download crash and experiment with it ~ 30 seconds.
But that requires
Some better UI work (mostly done)
Good Docs (mostly done)
Better UX for first user (mostly done)
Better exception handling (mostly done)
Rhino account auth (started)
Some Online Crash server sandboxes (not started)
Improve upload/download speed and fix the 1mb bug (solved)
All in all some time early next year I’m hoping to have most of this ironed out.
Splitting this thread off as users have started discussing wishes for Multi-User and I think this is the best place for it.
That sounds amazing! I’m looking forward to the release. It would be incredibly powerful to have it natively integrated into Rhino. Here is a screenshot of the teamwork panel from Archicad. You can see how a single document is used, allowing you to own and send objects. We work every day in teams of various sizes, with up to 10 people on the same projects.
I’ve not used ArchiCad, but it sounds like Crash works similarly. You create objects which are yours and you can release them when you’re done. And there is a panel which shows people in the model, and other collaborators cameras will move around the model as they move as well (which can be toggled off) but is a nice way to see what the team is up to.
Multi-User collaboration across multiple locations is a great feature I am looking for (and this should be ideally integrated with worksessions).
BUT
I think is easier (and more important) to have first a robust “state of the art” worksession manager first which works both in PC and Macs like discussed above.
How would you integrate the two together?
In theory Crash could go about its business sending changes between models and ignore your worksessioned files, allowing you to link in as many as you like. Which to be fair, is what happens now.
Crash could also send the relative location of a worksessioned file and try to worksession in files for other users who are connected relative to their local models. But this is a bit flimsy.
To clarify, I write crash in my spare time whilst also working at McNeel. So they will not exist in the same priority list.
I think Worksession is outdated, and I’m not sure if a robust cloud-based multi-user experience, like Crash, might make it obsolete. In our team, we use Rhino in a ‘multi-user’ setup by inserting Rhino files as blocks and then using a single Rhino file as a container for all these blocks. With the new Block Manager, this approach already shows more potential than Worksession.
My first Wishes for Crash:
It would be great if Crash could support linked blocks within a Rhino file.
Compatibility with plugins like VisualARQ would be a game-changer.
I’ve not used these much, it sounds like a fantastically sticky problem. I’ll look into blocks etc. when I’ve got layers etc working
Crash is built so that 3rd parties can write plugins to make their app multi-user. Of course a lot of work and testing needs doing until people will actually do that. But it’s something I’d love to see.
Currently I’ve used text dots which work. But actually adding a “comment” would definitely be possible. Can you tell me more about how you’d use these comments, how would you want to create them and how would you want to remove them?
A model chat as a new panel, almost like chatting in a discord channel?
Not a bad idea.
Hi @CallumSykes Sykes, I tested the markup feature of the IRhino app, and it’s close to what I envisioned as a comment tool. For multi-user purposes, it would be great to add personalized markups that appear in the chat. A use case could be marking up a specific part of the model and discussing it in the chat. In our office, we often create lists, so it would be useful to assign markups to colleagues for specific tasks. Is that what you can do in a discord channel?
Makes sense. Seems like a good idea.
I’ve almost finished the UI/UX work and making good progress with Auth, so after I release 1.5.0 with all these improvements I’ll look into something like this
I imagine a comment workflow where I can select an object in the model and through the properties or some other tab add a comment to the object as well as a specified color highlight. When the comment is resolved it should be changed to a different specified color. There should be a viewport that displays all the objects that have comments and their color highlights. Just a thousand mile view but this would be super helpful.
I like it. Nifty idea. I can see how this would be super useful. I’ll play around with it after 1.5.0 and see what the best way is to have comments, history and resolution assigned to objects.
Great! Also wondering if there would be a way to save comments separately as a txt or excel file alongside the Rhino file. One line corresponding to one comment could read like:
Maybe it would be possible to give the commented object a title like “Door 40” in the comment tab so it can be easily identified in the txt file or whatever kind of file it is. This would help if someone needs to check to see the status of work needed on a model without having to open a potentially heavy model. The file can be updated alongside the Rhino model potentially. Maybe editing the comment in the txt file could change the comment in the Rhino model as well? Not sure, just another thousand mile view idea to think about. Thanks for your hard work! I know you do this in your spare time!
It sounds like you want to be able to see if there are any to-do’s on a model without waiting for it to open, I think there are some more efficient ways to do this, such as just opening the comments in a read only mode, which could be very possible with a Crash model . All the data is organised nicely so you could just request the data you want.
I think Rhino Sync is interesting, but I believe this functionality should be a built-in feature of Rhino itself. I don’t fully trust third-party applications—while they often seem promising at first, development sometimes stops, they remain in beta and never fully mature, or they’re no longer supported in newer Rhino versions.
When it comes to multi-user collaboration, Rhino should take the lead. These third-party tools are often only known to users who are already deeply involved in the Rhino world. By integrating such functionality directly into Rhino, you could attract many new users. Applications like VisualARQ could then build their tools around this integrated functionality.
Also, since Worksession is no longer state-of-the-art—and not even supported on Mac—I really think it makes sense to fill that gap.
You have my vote to get the backing you need to bring this into Rhino! would be one of my favorit features in rhino 9
That was a lot of my focus with Crash, making a plugin SDK and the ability to make any Rhino set-up multi-user. I think that’s one of the most important things needed to make it of real use to the Rhino ecosystem and not have it relegated to only a specific discipline.
I think it’d need to be Rhino 10, I have a lot of other things to get done for 9
. All the data is organised nicely so you could just request the data you want.
