I saw this one when looking for info about xnurbs a while back, if I recall he also called people trolls and wanted mcneel to reveal the “haters” names public to feel shame
I was thinking to myself is this guy foreal? 
I know I joined late but some of these forum posts are comedy gold to scroll through sometimes.
This is a distinct possibility.
However…my bet is that in 10 years, Rhino will also still have untouched filleting and MatchSrf kernels, that will be celebrating nearly 30 years of being a general in-joke at McNeel.
Rhino 8 has seen a fantastic number of bug fixes since release. But as for surfacing, I can only assume and hope that CyberStrak will fix some matching and blending problems. Unless someone locks Menno in a cupboard.
It’s a useful education, but after a while I do get tired of going around and around patches using MatchSrf over and over again as it throws the CVs everywhere.
The very capable XNurbs technology still needs to be applied by an equally capable surface modeler/sculptor.
It is no one click solution like some tutorials try to suggest and also a lot of questionable patch layouts are shown even in the better tutorial videos.
Тhe person who did that modeling of the Porsche 911 uses “Loft” in Plasticity. He mentions Xnurbs only when the empty area around the headlight is shown for a brief moment.
The majority of the surfaces are “Loft” with G1 continuity using automatic settings (no manual control point editing), this is why the zebra stripes are broken everywhere.
I noticed that when the guy switches to G2 continuity for the preview, the zebra stripes get highly distorted, meaning that the surfaces are unable to offer a true G2 continuity like what’s possible with Alias or in Rhino with manual control point editing. I guess that Plasticity’s G2 matching in the shown examples is too aggressive and tries to place the 3rd row of control points as a straight continuation of the control polygon between the 1st and the 2nd rows. Sometimes Rhino also does that, so the 3rd row of control points requires some gentle refinement to achieve better surface flow by setting something like G1,8 
(slightly reduced G2, but better than G1).
while on topic they recently made a beta update, to me those zebra stripes still look strange like on the Porsche one
NONE of the examples you showed are done using xnurbs. This is not official learning material of plasticity, this is just some dude on youtube trying to sell online tutorials - who has as far as I am aware zero industry experience. He also specifically didn’t use xnurbs to create that course to appeal to the users of the cheaper plasticity tier that doesn’t even include xnurbs.
The current xnurbs implementation is simply superior in surface quality than what basic parasolid can deliver.
The video you watched contains none of the current align or square functionality. You can easily build surfaces of better quality with vanilla plasticity compared to vanilla rhino.
All the class A surfacing tools and xnurbs are not part of the trial. I’d recommend buying studio if you are interested and then refund within 2 weeks if you don’t want it.
If you watch the video more carefully after the middle, you will find out that he specifically mentions Xnurbs and shows how he used it to build the patch around the headlight.
Also, listen to the way he talks about Alias and industry standard techniques for automotive modeling. Rhino is capable of making far better surface quality than the surfaces in that video. He relies mostly on lofted surfaces with G1 tangency, which must be avoided in car modeling due to the poor surface transition they provide.
He claims that this is the most game changing, never seen before course for Plasticity.
Yes yes, but my point is, he is just some dude…
He doesn’t follow good procedure - but he is not some sort of spokesman for plasticity. He isn’t affiliated to plasticity. He doesn’t have good technique, he doesn’t even use xnurbs for building that car and he doesn’t use any of the latest surfacing tools plasticity has. Even the interface is still the old one. So I really don’t know what your point is? Some guy doesn’t model very well on the internet, therefore the software is no good and xnurbs is no good? By that measurement Rhino has to go straight to the garbage because there is a huge amount of terrible modeling on the internet showcased in Rhino.
I recommend you pick some better videos made by more competent people or even better just try it yourself.
For example look at this and let me know if it could be done in Rhino without painstakingly setting up every single patch and matching it by hand:
Not sure why you are writing all about Xnurbs regarding that video. I’m commenting his claims and the techniques he used to model the car. 
As for the time-lapse video you posted above, this is far from a true Class-A surface quality. By the end of the video you can see some warped areas at the top. I’m pretty sure that you can find a lot of imperfections in that model when you open it in Rhino to examine it with its analysis tools. Just because it “looks” shiny with a basic horizontal environment map in the viewport, does not mean that it’s a great quality.
Because you are dismissive about things you haven’t tried and haven’t really looked at.
Just like your claim it’s not “a true Class A surface”. It’s all single span surfaces. Whatever distortion you are seeing can be easily fixed by pushing some CVs. The point is that this patch layout, single span and G2 in all directions, was build in less than 15 minutes by combining a loose surface patch as a reference with Alias-esque square (btw. both tools Rhino doesn’t have) If the idea of that doesn’t make you at least a little bit excited I honestly don’t know what will.
Maybe Plasticity is doing something right after all because now McNeel is finally building their own copy of xnurbs - and will you look at that, they even were “inspired” by plasticities interface for it, maybe some people ARE taking notice and finally decided something needs to be done about Rhino’s core industrial design capabilities 
And to be fair there are still quite some areas where Rhino is still superior, even for surfacing. Plasticity to this day doesn’t have curvature combs for example, which I think currently is their biggest weakness for this kind of work. But at the pace they are currently developing I’d be shocked if next year this time they are not already implemented.
Indeed, it’s well worth a try. I hope it can eventually replace Fusion in our industrial design education.
As a subtle but important point, I’m not sure that McNeel is quite “copying” Xnurbs, in so much as they are making an implementation of the same scientific paper. It’s hardly suprising the interface and inputs would be similar, as they will share broad sets of variables.
As for the last video, I’m not sure, other than doing it in twice normal time speed, what it shows. I’d imagine someone with Rhino WIP/9 and Cyberstrak could probably get there with this speed. Also, regardless of what fill is happening, the crucial choice of patch layout is still very important here. I think that is the thing that will trip people over, not really the surface filling method.
It has a very nice choice of interface in Plasticity. It certainly looks more slick than Rhino.
honestly i do not know what you are on about rhino looks slick and hip to me
)
Well, xnurbs has been around for a decade or so with a different interface, the specific interface that plasticity is using (with the continuity toggle buttons on the edges, which works very well) was introduced by plasticity, and one year later McNeel implements the exact same interface with their copy of xnurbs… I mean sure, you can tell yourself that this is all one big coincidence, but c’mon
Also no shame in that, I can also point at ten things in Plasticity that are copied from Rhino. But we can at least acknowledge it.
And now, if your argument is someone needs Rhino WIP 9, a software that isn’t even out for another 2 (3?) years and an external, paid plugin that probably doesn’t even work with said beta… to match a surfacing workflow you can do TODAY in a tool that costs a third of the price of Rhino. And then there’s still a big question mark if this could actually be done so quickly (hint: it won’t be - have you tried fillsrf? this is still very new and very beta and isn’t nearly as robust and good as xnurbs yet).
Please just think about it - isn’t it insane to claim Rhino does it better “if only” this and “if only” that? Why be so dismissive of a software that absolutely runs circles around Rhino in some aspects right now? This should be a learning experience for McNeel and all of us. I love Rhino and there are many things I can do with Rhino I still can’t do in Plasticity and I need Rhino for my job. But it’s also a fact that I rarely still want to do actual modeling in Rhino since I bought a license of Plasticity. There are just so many things that just work plain better there. It has to be a wake up call for McNeel to go faster, break some old stuff and keep up. Or Plasticity will one day eat Rhino’s lunch.
Pro tip: One can use more than one type of software in the product development process.
xnurbs should hire you the nr 1 salesman 
I already wrote that I have tried Plasticity twice. Go above and read again.
I don’t find it good enough for my purpose. It’s more focused on engineering detailing and I like the ability to edit Boolean operation in real-time, but this is not what I’m looking for (car body and product surfacing with robust manual control point refinement, surface evaluation, chassis and suspension engineering, layer management etc). None of these are good in Plasticity so far, despite the bold claims and the time-lapse videos online.
Also, having single-span surfaces with G2 matching does not mean a model is Class-A quality. The latter is strictly related to the perfect visual smoothness, whereas the video you posted above shows a random model with lots of imperfections and waviness.
A clear example for this is the moment after 4:44 minute in the following video. The surfaces may have close to G2 continuity, but the surface patch layout is completely wrong and the waviness across all 3 newly built surfaces is super obvious. What they lack is a visual surface smoothness.
Opening this model in Rhino will reveal all the imperfections thanks to the advanced analysis tools. It’s a nice model for visual purposes, but far from Class-A. Don’t get offended just because I can prove the truth.
This is not “near G2”, these are G2 transitions as you can see from the curvature deviation analysis on screen. And if you don’t like the reflection pull the CVs until you like them? This is how you do it in any software including Rhino. This solely depends on the user, not the software. I agree that this is not an ideal setup of surfaces in the video you posted, too fragmented, wrong hierarchy, this is probably not how a professional would build this chassis. But this is user error and not the fault of the software, is it?
See, I totally agree that Plasticity isn’t there yet. Especially without curvature combs it’s basically impossible to do this kind of surfacing on a serious level because relying on zebras and mathematical curvature analysis can only get you so far. I wouldn’t recommend plasticity (yet) to anyone who wants to build cars. For that matter probably many pros would vehemently disagree that Rhino is the right tool either, but everybody should use what they like
But what I’m seeing is just that they have added more surfacing features in the last half year than Rhino did in the last ten. Their align/match tool is out for a couple of weeks and it already can do things that Rhino still can’t do (CV blending). I think hand waving this away because some guy on youtube didn’t build the perfect reflections in ten minutes is a dangerous approach. I’m not saying we all have to switch to plasticity, it’s more about asking McNeel why we can’t have these things?
And what advanced analysis tools in Rhino do you specifically mean? Can you name the commands? I’d like to put them on plasticity’s public feature request board, they have a habit of implementing this stuff very quickly. Maybe this pain point of yours could be removed quickly. Curvature combs is an obvious one, but what else?
Only the XNurbs guy knows the true value of XNurbs.
P.S.: I say that as a daily user of XNurbs. I was merely making fun of XNurbs slightly autistic approach approach to social media interactions.
