Parasolid assumption

Ive just found out the hard way, which wasted a lot of my time, that rhino 5 & 6 will write parasolid files, but not read them…
Apparently this is because it costs a lot of money to license whatever is needed to read the files…?

Whatever; it would be useful to flag somewhere where a user writing this format will see it that this is the case, (along with any other formats something similar applies to), because my designer’s mind naturally assumed if rhino would write something, it could of course read it back…

cheers
rabbit

This has been true since Rhino V2.
Here’s a relatively recent file format page with that detail:
https://www.rhino3d.com/formats/

Datakit makes a Parasolid import plug-in for Rhino.

This may well have been true since V2, but 24 April 2002 is a long long time ago…

Since I don’t spend all my time in rhino writing parasolid files, (in fact recently was the first time) I was caught out by this.
I don’t think it is unreasonable to flag the fact that rhino can’t read the format it has just written, within the options dialog that appears when saving out the file…

cheers
rabbit

Hi Tony - there are a few formats we write but do not read - it depends on what is available in the way of support for those file types - libraries etc. x_t’s, at least as I recall was the reason, was so prohibitively expensive to license that the price of Rhino would have had to be noticeably more than it is, just to support reading that one format…

-Pascal