I don’t think anyone here is suggesting that you steal someone else’s intellectual property. McNeel is a mature company in a mature field. When you consider the wide spectrum of implementations of a particular functionality across the various CAD systems it is certainly possible to see which ones do a better job and satisfy the most users. The problem is that most users are familiar with only a small number of systems, so are unable to make an “absolute” judgement of what’s best.
On the other hand, if McNeel personnel can come down from their high horse and make an effort to understand what their users find “better” in other products it should be possible to move the industry forward. It’s exactly this which has allowed advancement in every aspect of human development. A good place to start is to become familiar enough with competing systems, or at least the part that some Rhino user brings to your attention, that the poor user doesn’t need to write a doctoral dissertation on how Rhino could be better. If you do your part then the user just needs to point out specific differences that he/she finds much improved over Rhino. This is called “benchmarking” in the industries I’ve worked in.
To assume the user wants you to copy the competitor is way off the mark. Most of the time I think the attitude is “here’s what’s better than Rhino now - let’s see you do even better”. If you can’t do better then there is absolutely no shame in copying the current “industry best”. When industry improvement of a certain feature plateaus at a certain point it behooves all the other suppliers to copy it. After all, McNeel stole the idea of CAD from somewhere. Somebody else thought up the idea of using points, lines, NURBS, mice, video screens, etc.
McNeel is, however, very fortunate to have among it’s customers a few very talented people who can (and don’t seem to mind) doing the “doctoral dissertation” including videos of other systems and handmade mockups as well as detailed write-ups.
A little more gratitude and acknowledgment would probably go a lot further than telling the suggestion contributors that are doing it the wrong way and whining about how it takes time and money to make improvements. Everything Rhino has took time and money. I’ve never heard anyone at McNeel apologise for the time and money that thousands of users waste every day due to a less-than-industry-best-practices approach to certain functions.
You really pushed my button with your post. Now I’ll go back to doing what I can with Rhino at the speed it allows and the effort it requires.
Interesting plugin, thanks for the tip!
Just fiddling around with it - cutting lines works fine, but I just can’t figure how to do the Sketchup-like Push/Pull thing like in the video…
Hence the reason I intentionally avoided mentioning SketchUp in the original post above. I believe there is a market trend towards–and users acquiring the taste for–robust asset libraries and user-generated model repositories. My experience tells me designers find value in having these integrated utilities. This does not require mentioning any specific software.
Personally, I can’t stand working in SketchUp and have no interest in push-pull. What is the value of moving towards the workflow of a software that is still in many ways a hobbyist’s tool? I know SketchUp users who have learned to squeeze the most out that software, but their user base–to no fault of the designer–often lack a traditional 3D modeling skillset. SketchUp modeling experience doesn’t translate well to other professional 3D modeling software. I believe hiding the underlying truth of geometries with the vail of “easy” is a grave disservice to designers working in any profession.
This might make me sound like a corprate hack, but McNeel representatives have every reason to remind us that they are not interested in making their product function like other software on the market. I don’t think “present the problem to solve not the solution to the problem.” is too much to ask–let’s strive to do this whenever possible.
Don’t like to work in Sketchup either, but have a interest in Push/Pull. This specific tool/worklfow has proven to be very useful, so why not add it here?
I wouldn’t worry so much - nothing is taken away, and no ‘general workflow’ is shifted towards anything Sektchup like because of that.
I don’t think that adding a small and welcome feature (push and pull, in the manner of SkecthUp) means something negative and not very functional that could upset the Rhino modus operandi.
Rhino and Sketchup belong to two different, opposite cad categories: the first nurbs and the second polygon / mesh.
If anything, the problem would be to transform Rhino into a jumble of tools, not very accurate, made just for “play”, to please everyone (many of his tools are left to the stone age, with some small options or aesthetic additions,nothing at all see with more professional cutting software, such as Alias, Icem Surf, or even VSR plug-in).
Thing is, for example with us archies: even in one and the same file, it can happen that some parts need to be accurate (building), and others just approximated (the context, street, …) for study/rendering purposes.
Of course the tools should be precise and offer numerical input, but sometimes it’s enough to ‘block things out’. If precision is possible if needed, it’s all good, right?
I’m going to switch direction here, just to throw this idea in the mix. I mentioned this a few years back, but it would be nice to have an option to highlight surfaces with the cursor for selecting, as opposed to the selection window that pops up. It’s not for everyone, so that’s why I would suggest it as an option. Here is a quick video of what I mean.
I find selecting surfaces in this other software to be much faster than how we do it in Rhino.
What you mean is pre-selection highlighting.
However, in an orthographic view, it often happens that lines/surfaces lie exactly on top of each other. How would you switch through the individual objects then without the popup-menu?
I completely agree with you Dan here. Pre-highlighting makes a lot more sense than mousing over an abstracted list. This would be very welcome for subobjects in mesh-SubD also. This is the way Modo works and it’s very intuitive and certain.
You inspired me to write a post analyzing other tools i work with and features i miss in rhino or i think where rhino could improve, mostly relevant for AEC demands:
Microstation - absolute beast in robustness due to parasolid kernel, solid booleans work flawlessly, surface offsets/thickening is done flawlessly, no problems far from origin like Rhino has, it has got built in system of coordinate system transformations which is super useful fo AEC → if you position your model in any coordinate system you can reproject it into another in one click
Sketchup - quick push and pull is great for quick sketching, 3dwarehouse of models (idea to turn food4rhino to also offer model sharing maybe?), little nice hacks like when you copy something with gumball by a distance when and you type in x5 it creates quick linear array
Revit - great dynamic sections, adaptive parametric components with more than 1 insertion point and parameters to drive geometry - this one is tough because rhino does not support constraints nor dimension driven modelling, maybe one day
Autocad - nothing great about this one but annotation capabilites are superior to Rhino and stuff related to layouts, more granular settings … parametric blocks are also very handy but its all about parameters which are not supported in Rhino
The most important is robustness of operations and diminishing all far from origin problems down to intrinsic mathematical limitations (or geometrical calculations would be calculated with relative cplane coordinates which can be much smaller than global). I have heard enough how one should model close to origin but its not a thing in AEC (cant think of a large company like ours working on huge railway projects and not work in coordinates).
