I believe that Rhino is inadvertently evolving in this direction.
The images show real-life product examples. Things that were designed in Rhino and then the 3d data used for manufacturing.
As I mentioned above, the larger surface transitions are G2, some less important rounded edges are G1. And a few of them are like G1,5 (better than G1 but not G2 in certain areas). 
For car interior parts that will be covered with leather upholstery G2 on small rounded corners is not necessary. The idea here is to show the modeling strategy (hence the visible surface edges) and that Rhino is perfectly capable of doing these tasks with ease (especially useful is its versatile “Blend surface” that could produce a single, very long multi-span surface without breaking it into separate surfaces at tangent areas, unlike most CAD programs).
Class-A surface quality is necessary primarily on the car exterior panels, because the glossy reflections could immediately reveal any imperfection in surface matching continuity. Rhino is almost capable of doing that, but not in every scenario. In certain situations its limited capabilities forces the modeler to use a variety of tools to achieve something that takes much less time and effort in VSR for Rhino 5 or in Alias. For example, both VSR and Alias could match up to 4 edges of a non-trimmed surface to adjacent surface edges or curves, while simultaneously allowing to:
a) Use different edge continuity for each surface edge.
b) Change the structure of the surface to custom values (maximum degree and number of spans).
c) Use Zebra or static Light lines analysis.
d) Use Curvature analysis.
e) Show edge continuity with a number for each surface edge showing the area with maximum deviation.
Tha same goes for the “Blend surface” tools in VSR and Alias.
To do that in Rhino, you are forced to use “Match surface” or “Blend surface”, then check the surface quality, then use “Rebuild surface”, then probably some manual control point adjustment, then “Match surface” again to each surface edge separately (because the “! _MatchSrf _MultipleMatches” command is limited to use only one of the following: Position, Tancent or Curvature; but not a combination of them). Usually that involves many steps to achieve something that’s close enough to a Class-A surface, and it’s not always possible. On the other hand, both VSR and Alias can do it with a single tool, taking just a fraction of the time and the end result is clearly better.
Any mechanical part was designed in Rhino, including the door windows lift system, door hinge, bonnet hinge, engine cover hinge and suspension. While Rhino lacks mechanical mating of components like the ones found in SolidWorks, Inventor and Catia, the user is still able to use the “Rotate” and “Move” tools in Rhino to find the relative start and end position of moving parts, though it may be a bit of a hit and miss, i.e. a dual-link hinge or a multi-link front suspension with manually moved linkage components may not give 100% accurate representation of the actual movement.
Thanks to replacing the conventional upper front A-arm with two individual toe links, high-speed cornering was expected to be very good due to the greater gain of camber angle for the outer wheel:
The door window is cut from a basic cylinder, so it’s pretty easy to find its center of rotation and just use that axis to see how it’s expected to move across its entire stroke inside the door panel. The door hinge has a fixed axis, too, and it’s a no brainer to find its end position when it’s fully opened, by using an extended version of the door gas spring. The “Copy” option of the “Rotate 3d” tool even lets you make an unlimited number of copies of the rotated objects at the desired angles, so it’s handy to check for possible collisions.
The suspension geometry was primarily tested with an on-line suspension geometry software called
It’s exceptionally helpful, because it lets the user to conveniently adjust any parameter of a double-wishbone suspension to figure out the best solution before going to draw it in 3d.
Then I tried several setups in Rhino to find out which one of them worked the way I wanted.
As a final step, SolidWorks was only used to validate the suspension and hinges with full 3d motion and check for collisions with nearby body panels. They all performed as expected, so everything that was already designed in Rhino didn’t needed any adjustment. SW allowed to properly check the bump steer, camber angle, caster angle and relative angle to counteract tyre deflection during high-speed cornering with simulated body roll.
Rhino 3 also provided good tools for basic car exterior surfacing:
No. 
Hopefully my next car project will be manufactured by myself. Time will tell.
LOL, my mom’s car was designed with Rhino! But there’s many hints of it in the design i noticed. I thought i was a coincidence of styles.
BlockquoteRhino is almost capable of doing that, but not in every scenario.
Very true, Rhino 6 is currently 98% there, It won’t take much for Robert McNeel & Associates to bring it to 100%. I don’t know what’s stopping them.
For me, the most important point of automotive surfacing is to blend and match surfaces to not edges but on any part of the surfaces with G3 continuity and adjust them easily. Also, moving control points should be done not individually but on a “regional” basis. Icemsurf, for example, does not adjust and finetune surfaces not by moving each individual control points but by moving lines or zones that connects between control points. That allows very global modifications of a surface with great precision.
All very beautiful!
I wonder: why Renault, Peugeot, Bmw, etc. don’t they use Rhino for their designs?
Why would they spend tens and tens of thousands of dollars on software licenses like Catia, Alias or Nx, and they don’t use Rhino?
I thought i was a coincidence of styles.
No it really isn’t. The concept was initially called; CTH - Combine Tete Haute it consists of Three unique features.
-
Insrument pannels placed above steering wheel. Typically it is about 4 degrees higher up and 100mm further forward than an average car from driver’s point of view.
-
Compact steering wheel slightly deformed but with a central rotational point.
-
Center touch screen that is raised up and out of dashboard volume. The first Peugeot 208 was the first car to do so in Europe when it came out back in 2012. (with the exception of peugeot 308 with embeded central screen)
Im almost sure Marcello Gandini used Grasshopper for the Marzal concept 
I’m pretty sure that many product designers, including car designers, will start to use Rhino as their primary surfacing tool at the moment Rhino could offer them the tools we discussed above, plus the ability to keep the “Blend surface” or “Sweep 2 rails” settings active while also editing an adjacent surface (already proven to be possible in Rhino 5 with VSR almost a decade ago):
On-topic:
Maki games table top sets:
Design strategy for the main shape. The parts had to be able to stack in either direction.
Radical SR3 replica:
Throw control (a dummy sponge gamepad for nervous gamers):
The Cinese company that did the CNC-milling of the moulds “simplified” my model to cut cost and time, and basically deleted a lot of features.
A video game in development for Android (the snake’s border, 3d letters, 2d font and diamond figures are modeled with Rhino, and then coloured in Paint.NET):
Furniture:
An electric car not yet on the market, but in development:
I don’t doubt Rhino’s potential.
I’ve always wondered why many car manufacturers (and not only) do not use Rhino;
Years ago I tried using Alias and I got a headache!
Perhaps, the only similar one is SolidThinking, but Rhino I find it better, in my opinion.
If the developers fixed all the creation and editing tools (including the blend srf), it would be really perfect! But, maybe, the priorities will be different, I don’t know …
Yes, we need these VSR features:
Exactly!
this is what I would like to see in Rhino (blend, match, but also fillet and shell, offset srf), besides SubD and Grasshopper.
I will repeat it endlessly: these shortcomings are really a shame, because they would make Rhino an excellent cad, complete and powerful for any kind of modeling, even for the most “refined”.
@Rhino_Bulgaria @davide76
Really great work. I couldn’t do this with Rhino. Nomatter if its “just” under-the-leather-interior and a lot of class A/2 or B areas, it still requires a lot of expertice to come to this point! 
I think beyond all this its really not a matter of the tool alone. Its about workflow and the system’s requirements. If you are free to choose, then choose the best suited for you.
Its a pitty that I cannot show my work. Because I mixed a lot Rhino, Catia and Icem Surf. I was working many years in the Exterior design, and was involved in many flagship cars for Volkswagen, Bugatti and Audi.
I think the same problem as @SINYW has. Its really difficult to point out why we still stick to Icem Surf without showing any production data. I’ve said this often, Icem Surf is far from perfect. I mean you cannot undo more then one step. Do I have tell more? 
@davide76
Its just very specialised to class A, and all of its surface and analytic tools work slightly different because of this. So I don’t think Rhino is very close yet. There are so many things to consider its just not bound to its strong matching and analytic tools. Its actually a complete different philosophy, which breaks down to single-span vs multi-span debate. All tools produce quality single span surfaces with little cleaning up required afterwards, which boosts workflow within the class-A world expotentially. Still people need to know how to do things, so its not a guarantee to create awesome models. Also the opposite is true, A skilled Rhino modelling expert can reach class A, Rhino is just not really helping you achiving this. At least without VSR.
The reason people using parametric modelers like Catia for the constructive part, is its parametric nature and its extremly stable surface tools. Its a bit like making a Grasshopper model, and only change the input surfaces (the class A skin) and some curves. Of course this doesn’t work anywhere but it helps. It further can handle enourmous amounts of data, where Rhino is already not responsive anymore. Filleting in Catia is actually fun
What You don’t understand is that Class A modelling automotive surfaces IS a gigantic headache that needs special training and years of experience to completely understand and master.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that Rhino gets all the tools needed to compete with ICEM Alias etc.
Do you think that then one could magically surface a complex carbody with perfect transitions in a matter of minutes? There are hourlong videos on youtube contemplating the surfacing of ONE Y shaped surface transition, for chrissakes.
Of course that doesn’t mean that Rhino couldn’t add usability and versatility in these tasks and furthermore the discussed tools for surface analysis and manipulation (all that VSR style stuff) would greatly enhance the workflow for high quality product design surfacing.
So, bring it on McNeel
I understand.
Having more refined modeling tools at your disposal does not mean modeling easily; as far as I’m concerned, I have no intention of modeling car bodies …
I think McNell, at least for now, has no intention of introducing tools dedicated to the automotive sector; the tools that Rhino currently has are more than enough to carry out 90% of the modeling.
I think someone should develop a plug-in (like xnurbs for the multiblend) that can do as VSR, for Rhino 6 and 7, dedicated tools for modeling style surfaces, class A.
Best blends, matches, curve management and editing, analysis, etc.
I don’t see any other way …
Since this thread is already derailed beyond rescue… 
First, car bodies are not the only products that would benefit from more surface tools.
Second, I’d prefer that someone develop robust filleting tools (and drafting) tools so we can get the last 10% as well.
What @Rhino_Bulgaria does more or less manually in Rhino is extremely impressive, but utter insanity. If he’d learned Alias years ago, the sad truth is that he’d be orders of magnitudes faster at his job today (sorry, but I think the multitudes of customers complaining about Rhino’s poor tools are evidence enough of this matter… Rhino is amazing for roughing out surfaces, but those last 10% take ages… in fact, correct me if I’m wrong but I believe @Rhino_Bulgaria is somewhat of a Unicorn!).
Here’s just a novice bumping in, @davide76 CV manipulation in Alias has much more automation than what’s available in Rhino. This makes it easier to not only see the result of the modeling operation in real-time, as opposed to after confirming the operation as done in Rhino. And this is on top of better analysis tools like @TomTom explained.
What I think is huge in terms of workflow is the new, node based, history visualiser in Alias. From my understanding, if a certain modelling command is invoked, a blend surface for instance, it creates a node for the blend surface command. This allows for much quicker iteration and procedural modelling while keeping the advantages of discrete modelling, see:
Note that Dynamo is increasingly incorporated into Alias, which from a marketing perspective probably means: “hey, you don’t have to use Grasshopper anymore.” But I don’t know how advanced Dynamo’s tools are (it does include T-splines ).
With developments like “gradient hatch” and meeting the requirements of non-engineering, non-3d modeling fields, I doubt that will happen in the next two releases. (maybe Rhino9/10)
I’ve been to an Autodesk symposium two years ago. They told to fully make Alias geometry accessable by script and for Dynamo. A fully open api, quite similar to Rhinocommon. Just with better suited surface tools. If they achive this, this really could change things. As far as I remember Dynamo with Alias is not working well. Could have changed recently, don’t know… Alias development is really aggressive. They to some sort trying to kill Icem in class A and Rhino in Generative modelling. Many in the industry I talked to do still believe Icem Surf is just a tick better yet. Same as Rhino with Grasshopper. But all of them admit that this can and already changes throughout the industry… Dassault currently pushes Catia ISD , but this is also high risk route they take. Basically an parametric Icem Surf. Will this work, I don’t know…
