I just heard about this tool on LinkedIn - www.bezel.it. Very impressive and I am sad McNeel did not think of this first.
I really wish Rhino/McNeel would embrace new trends in 3D industry - I’m a long time Rhino user (started with v1.0 back in 1999) and see a gaping hole in the market for an equivalent for AdobeXD/Sketch/Figma in 3D space. Demand for designer friendly tools to create VR/AR experiences is an unmet need. Designer’s only choice is to learn Unity and Unreal Engine which are more focused on developers.
Rhino was a great design tool and aligned with how I thought as an Industrial Designer when I started my design career. I transitioned away from Industrial Design into Interaction Design and UX a decade ago. Up until now, it was a 2D medium, but the trend is quickly pivoting into 3D.
There is a lot of independent development in this area, 3rd party users and firms that are in the business of flushing out these potential workflows. We first and foremost look to make Rhino as accessible as possible to such development. Which is evident from the wide variety of arenas these contributions are being made. This particular workflow is attractive to some and but may not necessarily be the standard in a few years.
Lets let the creative process work a bit before saying it’s a much needed direction for Rhino.
It looks good but you can never tell with LinkedIn. So much stuff is marketing. You’d actually have to model something and compare.
If Rhino were to become say, a “do everything” program such as Blender, it wouldn’t work as well for the stuff it does do well. As it gets more feature rich it also gets more cluttered. More developer hours will be bogged down in resolving various bugs and conflicts. It’s a low cost niche software that does what it does well. For what I use it for I’m 4 to 8 times faster compared to any of it’s competitors.
Unity and Unreal Engine are huge companies and far bigger than McNeel and geared more towards what you’ve described.
R7 is getting quite old so technically it’s behind the times but still incredibly useful.
Curious what your Product Managment methodolgies look like at McNeel. Rhino was originally a disruptive solution in a nascent market. Because of that early solution, it got a foothold with Industrial Designers who were over served with tools llike Alias|Wavefront.
Your response makes it very clear McNeel has forgotten what got here and is succumbing to the fate incumbents always fall into as described by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma.
I also did spend time using the product BTW. Clearly inspired by Autodesk/Rhino with command line based UI (which is one of the things I love about Rhino)
As an end-user who relies heavily on Rhino for industrial, interior and architectural design, I’d hate for McNeel to enter this space. In my eyes, McNeel is a small company with limited (albeit very talented) ressources, and spreading those ressources thin(ner) on a completely new endavour would take away from the main product. A main product that is both complex, capable and versatile in creating complex, production-ready end results for a wide range of industries.
There are plenty of ways to easily get your 3D data into VR - quite a few even integrated with Rhino in some way: Simlab (and they have a free version!), Mindesk, IrisVR, Modelo.io and probably others I don’t know of.
From what I can tell, Bezel looks to be based on “drag’n’drop” and polygon modelling (which totally makes sense!), which is a very far cry from what Rhino, from my point of view, excels at: Nurbs-based modelling of complex objects (be it product design, jewelry, architecture, shoes, vehicle design, furniture etc.); and of course Grasshopper which has found its use in a areas way beyond the intended use case.
I think that McNeel should put their development hours into expanding on those core competences in new and exciting ways, just like they did with Grasshopper and the Nurbs-compatible implementation of Sub-D. Suddenly shifting (part of) that focus to a mesh-based, “quick’n’dirty” prototype tool, one that’s based on a completely new (and still emerging) platform and far from the in-house competences, might seem like a blue ocean strategy, but could easily end up with McNeel being the fish out of water.
Of course if someone wanted to make a web-based modeler with Rhino as the ‘back end,’ today they could do that. And that’s really the strategy with Rhino, make it a “platform” so that 20 years after it’s obsolete people still have to buy it because their business is dependent on some janky vertical solution …just like AutoCAD.
But yeah no McNeel are too small to go off in some totally different direction, they’ve got a 5-figure “issues” list to deal with. It would have to be a new separate thing. I don’t know if the Mac version even made economic sense.
…I hope so too. I’ve been Rhino ambassador for decades, and for seriously big organizations (Automotive OEM Studios) through my career in automotive design and engineering. Rhino 5 had Blue-Red 3D option as display setting, very useful during the design process! I was so disappointed when even that got stripped out from later versions. AR/VR and Blue-Red 3D should be supported as a setting, without a question. It’s not tricky, and nice people in Helsinki at Varjo HQ can tell you what you need, I’m not full stack developer, but shouldn’t be rocket science to have it on SW, as long as sufficient RTX graphics card is there on a HW side to support. Hoping McNeel guys are delivering…
