I appreciate the thoughts you all have shared!
I understand the cost/benefit considerations for me. It isn’t so straightforward though, as I can invest the intervening time in other valuable things. There are many aspects to the craft I am working on developing. Rhino is only potentially part of that picture. I just find myself hesitating and thought I’d share my thoughts. Maybe it is useful for McNeel to get feedback from someone like me, as I am surely not alone in this.
Something else that occurs to me is that customers who buy at different times in the release cycle get different amounts of value. People who happen to buy right after a release get the most value. People who buy just before release get the least. It is a little like buying an old or slightly used model of a car for the price of new. Consider that if I buy just before release, I will never get to use or play with a WIP version. Those of you who have had V7 were able to use some V8 features for a while. Not me.
Maybe pricing should reflect this, to try to even out value for customers buying at different times. Perhaps as a software version ages, the price should go down, maybe more steeply as a new release approaches. You are buying somewhat behind-the-times software, after all. If a newly released version were $1000 and the same version a few months before a new release were only $800, it would help get buyers over the hump. It would still mean probably $1,200 to be up to date upon new release, but that’s not quite so painful.
Consider that if I buy now and upgrade when V8 is released, I will in essence be paying more to be current. If you bought early, three months after release, you will still be current and will have only spent $1,000. If I buy now and V8 is released in three months, and I want to be current, I will have to spend $1,400.
One could think about it in my case like this. If I plan to be up to date when V8 is released, in essence, the cost of the upgrade is what I pay to have Rhino in the meantime. So if Rhino 8 will be released in three months, that means it costs me $133/month to have Rhino until then. I then have to decide if I can justify that. If not, in the intervening time, when I have to withdraw from using Rhino, it is possible I’ll learn to live without it.
I am not a big company with a revenue stream that can just think about a Rhino purchase as “necessary tools” and an easily justifiable expense, where I would lose money for not having it, or whatever. I don’t have much money to spend at the moment and don’t have any immediate prospects of making money with Rhino. And $1,000 on software is a lot for me right now. Really, I probably have just as much chance of doing that with Rhino as with ZBrush or Illustrator or whatever else I invest my time into.
I am not looking to get into manufacturing or something. Rhino, for me, seems like a tool that would simply expand my possibilities for 3D modeling for my own artistic and design purposes. It’s easier to model certain kinds of things with it than with Blender, for example. I never previously really considered learning a CAD program, as I am not really interested in making machine parts or building plans. But I tried Plasticity because of all the buzz in the Blender community. Plasticity is supposed to be “CAD for artists”, and was made to be easy to use for those familiar with Blender. As I learned the NURBS approach, I saw a lot of power in it and in the CAD way of thinking, and possibilities that aren’t there with subdivision surface and high-poly sculpting methods. I soon discovered though that Plasticity is in many ways limited and missing important tools. So I tried Rhino, and seeing a lot of value in it, have been intensively learning it. So Plasticity was the bridge. Then I also discovered that Rhino is great for precise 2D drawing, better in many ways than Illustrator.
I’ve been trying Plasticity again though, and find myself able to get more out of it because of what I learned using Rhino. And it has advanced significantly since I abandoned it for Rhino. Going back to it and experimenting, I am surprised actually that its loft and patch tools seem better in some ways than Rhino’s. And its fillet tool is superior and easier and faster than Rhino’s and often succeeds where Rhino’s fails. I have been saving my models as STEP files and doing the fillets in Plasticity. Overall, I find myself making interesting things faster in Plasticity. But it is still missing many things. It certainly doesn’t have anything like Grasshopper, though Blender now has the powerful geometry nodes. And Plasticity can’t output nice SVG files for use in vector drawing programs like Illustrator. It doesn’t have anything like Make2D. I have little interest in Rhino’s SubD tools. I am much more comfortable doing that sort of thing in Blender/ZBrush.
It’s mainly the curve drawing and NURBS surfacing tools that interest me. Precise drawing, sweeping, projecting curves, trimming, CV manipulation, nice snapping and construction tools, and so on, and maybe Grasshopper for some things. But the most important core NURBS tools in Rhino seem kind of old and neglected, maybe even kind of broken. I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, some improvements in those core tools and maybe some VSR replacement stuff would be there in V8. I was also hoping the new Rhino version would be released by the time my trial ran out.
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