I know every app has bugs and issues, but spending the time to figure out what did not work and how I can get Keyshot to work if I was to use Fusion just did not seem feasible, especially with an app I am just testing out for possible buy.
For now Rhino in conjunction with Modo seem to do the trick for me.
I was just about to suggest Onshape too. Itās free! Mostly just for the constraints/assemblies.
If you really need assemblies then model in Rhino and assemble in Onshape.
One thing Iām not 100% sure of though is if the assembly be exported with constraints in a neutral format??
Thanks for the tip about RailRevolve. I hadnāt used that before. I was able to build that shape and then change the wall angle by rotating the profile curve. So thatās pretty cool.
Unfortunately after using OffsetSrf to thicken it, it created some kind of freaky geometry that Rhino was totally unable to fillet. Eventually I was able to use Cap and Shell (which broke the history) and finally get a filleted closed polysurface out of it. But only after fiddling around for several hours, and only within a narrow range of wall angle, thickness, fillet radius & type, and so on - otherwise it was full of holes and weird artifacts. It was pretty frustrating. But I learned some stuff!
Sounds weird. If I had trouble shelling that shape, Iād just offset my curve and railrev that with the same path.
OnShape can export assemblies as Parasolid or STEP files. As far as I know, thereās no such thing as a neutral format that maintains assembly constraints.
OnShape could be interesting, but I think at the moment itās really not ready yet. Just one example, they donāt even have a loft command. You can read the forums and see what people are saying. Iāve been playing around with it, but I donāt think Iāll spend any more time on it. I donāt see that it has anything that Fusion 360 doesnāt, and a whole lot of things are missing. Maybe Iāll look again in a few months.
Does it really run entirely inside a browser? I know its web-based, but it still seems hard to believe!
On the user side it does indeed run entirely in the browser.
And it is pretty responsive too.
The features that are implemented work very well, but it is still lacking a lot of functions.
Still, very promisingā¦
Norbert
Thatās what I meant by itās āpretty cool - although kind of in the way a dog driving a car is coolā¦ā It doesnāt work very well, but itās amazing it works at all! Seriously though, it does actually work surprisingly well.
I have to ammend that - with the free plan you can actually have as many private documents as you want. You can only have five of them āactiveā at a time, but the others you just have to make āinactiveā, you donāt have to delete them or make them public. Youāre not forced to make anything public at all. Making a document inactive just means you canāt open it, but itās still there. If you share it with someone, they can still make it one of their active documents and open it, even if itās inactive for you. Each document can have multiple parts and assemblies. Havenāt really worked through the implications - what about standard parts used in multiple designs? - but itās more workable than I had thought.
On the other hand, thereās a big difference in the storage space, 5 GB free vs. 100 GB paid. Thereās (currently) no way to make an offline archive, so after some time youāll run out of space and have to start deleting old projects.
Iām not sure what it offers that Fusion 360 doesnāt. And there really are a lot of things missingā¦
When I used offset surface to thicken it, the edge fillet looked like this at the top:
So I tried filleting the corners of the rail curve first, but then it failed on the surface offset:
I tried your suggestion of offsetting the profile curve to get the thickness, but the fillet didnāt do much better:
The cap & shell made it work ok. Obviously it has to do with how that top face gets constructed, but I donāt know enough to do it myself.
In any case, there were a lot of problems in the middle area fillets, with holes in the surface and so on:
Eventually I managed to get a closed surface out of it. It depended on the wall angle for some reason. It seemed pretty random and finicky.
Fusion 360 seemed to have no problem with it:
The same in Onshape, gave me no trouble:
There are a lot more options in Rhinoās fillet command - but at least the other two got the job finished without complaining.
@hve, if youāre still aroundā¦ why did you decide to use Simlab? What do you like about it? It looks interesting, but I canāt quite figure it out.
By the way, it used to use the Keyshot engine, but it doesnāt anymore. Theyāre using Intelās āembreeā now.
Nothing wrong with a hot topic I guess! The āwhatās the best softwareā question is sometimes like āwhatās the best football teamāā¦ mine, of course! Anyway itās great to hear peoplesā opinions, Iām getting a better understanding of it all. Itās a complex world as you said earlier.
Hey, saw something I wrote quoted so thought I might add a little.
You know what, I think Rhino, Solidworks, Solidedge etcā¦are all great for conceptual work. I guess āconceptualā is a little misleading as a term. Nutting out ideas, quick drawings, ā3d sketchesāā¦Rhino is great. I find myself being drawn to the parametric modelers more and more though. Hmmmā¦For my current workflow and as my skills in SolidWorks improve I think there are some definite benefits to such a platform. Use the best tool for the job is the best thing to do. When there are multiple programs that can do the same thing choose the one you like best.
I am power user in rhinoceros. I killed everyone which told that rhino is not good for design. But ā¦ We start use (except me) in work Fusion but its brutal rival. It is very nice co-op tsplines and parametric modeling and i must say its very comfortable if you create ā¦ Tsplines/offset/fillets/ ā¦ and on the end you start play with main tspline and recalculate complete tree. Brutal.
Do you have some of counter attack?!
Peter
Thank you for everyoneās contribution. I started learning rhino in 2010 because the architecture school I went use it as standard. Up to today I still canāt make use of Rhino. I know that it is been said to be a powerful tool for conceptulizing and so forth. But I have never successfully conceptualized anything with it. It seems to be well designed, capable, and user friendly. But Iām still sort of waiting for a perfect project that fits Rhinos ideology. After reading all your discoveries I see in concrete terms why Rhino does not work for me in reality.
Rhinoceros generates surfaces, or they call Nurbs. That is all that it does. It does not create solid objects that you can sculpt later on. It generates in a one shot, and then you get a curved surface. If you donāt like it. You have to generate it again. With T-Splines, you can tweak and bend that surface at will, and it gives the illusion that you are working on an object with solid core. T-splines seems changed the rhino to another software.
However since Autodesk bought T-splines, it integrates with Fusion better. I havenāt modeled with fusion much but through the tutorials, it looks like some of the maneuvers just canāt be done as easily if in rhino. In either solidwork of fusion, the program knows that an object is an object. Yet in Rhino the program takes everything as a piece of surface.
Iām half way through reading this post. Still making between Fusion and Rhino+RhinoCam.
Sidenote: if I remember me right on my tests Fusion works with an online storage only.
Agreed. I really tried to like Rhino. But canāt find it useful to design anything. It is more like a digital fabricator that generates sheet metal. The program is good for creating surfaces, but it doesnāt know what is an object. And therefore all the tweaking has to be done to the Nurbs, not the object. I too am really hoping someone can give a specific example that Rhino is superior in freeform modeling.
btw, Rhino can do many impossible tasks with plug-ins like Panelling Tool and Grasshopper. But when comes to making a guitar knob, in what way does it really excel?
Hi guys, sorry for the late reply here. With all respect to Rhino, which I felt was a great app, I finally use Fusion 360 in combination with Simlab Composer. The main reason is that I need solid operations quite a lot and I feel more confortable with this way of working, thanks.
Hi NadaNix,
an old discussion and probably never tiring subject, but the sentence you wrote there is very true. When I consider some of the best European furniture, luminaire and electronic consumer product brands, considering how their designers work, their use of parametric CAD speaks volumes. The perceived beauty of a product is, as always with consumers, in the eye of the beholder and, as you say also, claiming that good design can only be achieved via NURBS modellers is an exercise in futility.
I would rather say it 1st depends on the industry one works for - the public furniture sector is very different from power tools, which again is very different to contract furniture - and 2nd on the budget one is able to allocate to CAD. I would think for small studios or youngster startups, Rhino is a great affordable solution and it allows you to get there, whereas if you have a larger studio setup catering to more complex fast moving industries, you are likely well off with Creo or SolidWorks. And then, larger studios often use various softwares, depending on tasks and clients at hand.
I have used 3D CAD from 1989 onwards and the holy grail - āthe best softwareā, āthe one and only softwareā, āthe software for any possible projectā - remains as elusive as it were back then ; )
I agree with Lagom - there is no āthe best CAD swā.
I am using CAD for more than 20 years, AutoDesk family of product, SpaceClaim and Rhino. Rhino is good for free-form modeling. When I used to design furniture for retail store I design it sometime in AutoCad but more often in Rhino, but all drafting I did in AutoCAD - export model from Rhino (solid objects) to dwg file, import it in AutoCAD and do all drafting there because AutoCAD is just good with it.
But if I am supposed to design a guitar I think I would do it in Rhino.
The same case was when I started with designing jewelry, Rhino was as NURBS modellers no.1 candidate and it is still no.1 for that type of workā¦
Radovan
Hi! Iām a student & intermediate SolidWorks user, just now getting into Rhino for some Product Design purposes. So far Iāve been both blown away with the organic shape capabilities of the NURBS and also terrified at the inability to dimension objects easily and possibility of deleting their history.
Fusion 360 definitely crossed my mind as well, thatās why Iām posting hereā¦ but my question is this: Are there some well thought out beginner Mac Rhino tutorials out there? I have a couple seemingly good ones on PluralSight - but I just want to see what others recommend? Also, I checked out a couple McNeal tutorials, and I learned a lot, but I was surprised to see the teachers seemed to be āwinging itā and clicking through commands without proper explanations - I used to teach Adobe CC and I definitely was guilty of this as well- but with post editing you could easily fix these thingsā¦
Thank you.
Tutorials are on rhino3d.tv and on vimeo page ā¦ Rhino tutorials.
The best Rhino advantage is freedom. You can everything what do u want ā¦ no rules, no class a conditions.
