I realized that I’ve been using Rhino since 15 years and still happy to open it every time.
what a gift to be able to do work you love with cool people and great tools.
I share you sentiment and am very grateful for my own experience with Rhino I first tried it in 1998 hoping it could replace alias for the design studio I was planning on opening.
It can… if you are willing to spend an excruciating amount of time on workarounds ; )
Fortunately, I don’t have to make class A surfaces. I’m in Architecture industry and Rhino do wonders in working, importing, exporting all sorts of data and files.
sure, brutalist architecture can be very interesting either, but you never know when your demand for high surface quality even for architecture might change.
it did for me, but my needs for class A stuff changed a lot after I left the car biz and got into the toy biz.
I didn’t find the need for a lot of workarounds, in fact I found Rhino to be better suited for the stuff I ultimately ended up doing for most of my career. When I was using alias back in the early 90’s (green button ui) you couldn’t make a watertight part in Alias without extraordinary care and excruciating tedious detail. Their stich tools were all or nothing and it took forever to make something that could go thru our cnc gcode without creating a catastrophic z dive. (I watched a few cnc heads get destroyed in the learning process for our cnc guys..) This was early days for this stuff at Mattel, and as the tools progressed and we got better at it, the process became a little easier, but never easy.
Rhino came along in ‘98 and was a game changer with the simple ability to join a part into a closed polysurface and then verify it was closed. (no pink lines!) It also allowed you to extract one problem surface and fix it as opposed to having to explode the entire part like alias used to require. Once Rhino entered the pipeline the life expectancy of our CNC machines went up dramatically. Alias fell by the wayside pretty quickly after that in all of Mattel and Rhino took over.
I adopted Rhino very early (ironically to fix my alias files) and never looked back, the only thing I miss about alias is the marking menus, but it’s been a very long time since I sat down at alias, I’m sure a lot has changed, and I do envy some of their surfacing stuff.
In the end, it always comes down to the ever same issues - which industries you work in, what product categories you work with, what the clients require, what the clients budget for the CAD part of the design and subsequent product development process, etc.
Professional internal and external design and product development bureaux use several 3D programs for good reasons. In the last external design office context I worked in, we used three programs: Alias, Creo, Rhino… and, yes, AutoCAD ; )
i can’t imagine trying to make something printable or machinable in a reasonable amount of time and maintain on-the-fly editability without rhino.
Art deco is coming back too! New York is trying again. Brutalist style was a short dystopian era here in eastern Europe. Although some interesting examples are here, people just abandoned such buildings or already renovated. I have learned to make class A surface too and keep eye on related topics but I have rarely practical application for it. I have also learned Alias, Maya, 3ds max, Revit, Archicad, AutoCad along with all related plugins. Graphics and editing programs are another can of squiggly worms. I work back and forth from Rhino to all of them. I work in formal style like this. Whatever you can call it.
Mattel brings back childhood memories. I had a huge collection.