I’m always on the hunt for interesting jobs. I have my career path pretty much plotted (hopefully the demand doesn’t disappear). I’ve been looking into other areas. I often see jobs asking for Revit and Sketchup experience. I figure that if the client is asking for Sketchup I can probably match their expectations (if the scope of work is within my realm) using Rhino.
The two main issues I run into when trying to adapt Rhino to something normally done in Sketchup or another program are:
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A lack of content - It’s almost impossible to find models of stuff you need. You can import models from Sketchup but the mesh of something as simple as an end table seems to have more surfaces than the Sagrada Familia. Sketchup can just handle those models better (being a mesh modeller). Even some of the models created in Rhino itself have texture mapping issues that need to be resolved. We could model basic furniture so fast. But here we are :-S .
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Compatibility - Compatibility isn’t that bad. It’s just that so many jobs aren’t Rhino. Therefore you’re instantly at a disadvantage as many clients can use Sketchup but not Rhino (online viewers are one way to solve this issue). Even fixing some of the CAD import/export issues would create huge benefits in this area. I feel like there’s more fiddling around in external rendering programs than their ought to be as well. Although these issues seem far more complex than the CAD import/Export issues so it is what it is. I had good experiences with Enscape in R7 but haven’t checked to see if it’s working for R8 yet.
The obvious answer to the question “why don’t you just use those other programs” is the fact that I just enjoy Rhino so much more than Sketchup, Revit, and whatever else. Truth be told I don’t actually use Rhino for freelance work directly (but intend to). I use it to help with certain tasks and use it quite a lot to assist me with my day job. I see lots of gigs I could do if a few features worked a bit better (CAD imports/exports for example).