Hi Dan,
There are also dozens of posts from me about toolbars back in December/January that were never answered. However I am sure they got taken into consideration, as quite a number of the issues have already been fixed, and more fixes are in the pipeline in the next couple of weeks. I know Steve is banging on this stuff actively.
As you are one of the bigger “customizers” of toolbars in here, it would be great to have you testing - you will probably find stuff I didn’t. Maybe wait for the first 8.6 SRC and try a bit…
I think it will be best to wait for the 8.6 RC before I spend any more time on the UI. I’m happy to hear Steve’s comment that this is getting attention.
Rhino 8 brings a lot of anticipated features and enhancements, I’m very happy about many of them. I was playing with beta and giving feedback. Beta version ended almost 5 months ago, but to be honest, I feel like a beta tester and not in that cool phase where concepts dynamically change and we can discuss things and possibilities but in a phase before release where I need to track yet another thing that should work but doesn’t.
I always try to report bugs when I encounter them, but I also have work to do.
The sequence of: being stuck because of some bug, tracking what it might be, testing if it’s really it, preparing the reproducible example, and finally reporting the issue is very time and energy-consuming. After I’ve done all that I still need to figure out how to overcome this situation so I can continue with my work.
Excited about Rhino 8 but disappointed about its robustness while released, and disappointed about myself that I yet again fell into this trap of trying the new shiny thing… Probably it would be better for me to hold my temptation and wait 6 months or even 1 year but on the other hand, opening Rhino 7 and seeing the exploded UI mess that I need to clean every time puts me away from using Rhino 7.
At the current stage of Rhino development, there are even regressions between Service Releases so I’m not even sure if things working a month ago would still work. I keep multiple versions of Rhino installers on my disk just in case I need to juggle with them according to the features I need working.
One part of me is happy that it’s no longer Beta which means some plugin developers did a transition, but the other tells me that it still should be called beta, and I would have much more patience for the things that do not work reliably yet.
Also, I don’t want to wait forever for the Rhino 9 because I’m sure you will implement new great features, so I’m all conflicted… bugs did it to me.
Hi Jakub, Great feedback for McNeel. You should try to not feel disappointed about yourself. None of this is your fault, in any way.
I’m optimistic that we have reached the historic low of McNeel’s planning and execution of software development and that the will all be able to look back at this release as a perfect case study of “what NOT to do, ever ever ever again.”
I’m not even that disappointed with them, we have been raising flags that the shit was going to hit the fan, and they kept believing they knew better. Well, this time they didn’t. And we all learn from our mistakes. I just hope they do too.
I also want to put all this feedback in context: they’ve been doing a massive amount of work. And if we compare the level of effort, care and dedication to their platform and their customers with any other 3D company, we then realize things are not bad at all.
If I look at the level of progress, let alone the complete lack of customer support, that all other software we use has; I think McNeel is doing just fine, and they are playing at the extremely difficult end of the spectrum. They are also offering capabilities to so many industries matching the ones of 10 different pieces of completely different software.
So we’ll be ok. We’ll be using V8 sometime soon, and start playing with V9 WIP soon after, with renewed rules of engagement.
We acknowledge there have been made mistakes in the release process of Rhino 8, which we carefully evaluated and logged as a reminder/ checklist for the next major release. Once the Rhino 8 ship took off there was no going back though, and the only way forward is fixing bugs as quickly as possible. I can assure you that that is still going on and our developers are working hard to fix bugs as fast as they can. Tons of reported bugs already have been fixed. Some bugs are complex and intertwined which make them more difficult to fix, and fixing bugs is always at the risk of breaking other things. That’s inevitable.
We try our best to address and log bugs being reported, but this is human work and it’s not perfect. I can understand that it is frustrating if you spend lots of your (free) time in reporting bugs that don’t get addressed right away.
I mentioned this before, if you have reported issues that you don’t see getting addressed, it’s perfectly fine to bump the thread or @mention any of the McNeel staff. We truly appreciate your reports and feedback, and act on it, even though it might not always be made clear with a visible response.
yes, @eobet, you are right, Siemens NX has excellent support, too, and they are also an exception. I do not consider it relevant for our business since the version with advanced surfacing would cost me 11.5X the cost of a permanent license of Rhino, every, single, year:
In my case, this would cost our company u$139,680 every year. So yeah, you are technically right: there’s another company with great support but not much relevance here. No need to keep making NX comparisons.
I agree with you that McNeel’s level of development and care is worrisome. Something is horribly broken besides V8, IMO. It’s unacceptable that they ship stuff out that’s obviously completely unchecked. But I also have said enough already.
In my lil’ company, we have one saying: only 50% of your responsibility is doing your work, because the other 50% is checking your work and making sure it’s correct. “always check your work” is something we say here, sometimes daily. It makes a huge difference. That needs to be a bit more part of the McNeel culture.
Yup, nobody at our company took Rhino seriously before I started using it (and btw, we bought our first permanent license as a test because it costs literally less than what we bill for two days work). However, I just today had to get two additional Mach 3 upgrades and it’s becoming hard to swallow even for us. So I actually steered one of our newest juniors to test Rhino (instead of Plasticity) and I don’t think my boss can afford to say no now so we’ll see how that goes (hope neither of them reads this).
Rhino is a fantastic design and design business tool for us. We make a lot of our money thanks to Rhino, so we cannot forget that, ever, no matter how upset we get.
For the advanced work we do, a default Rhino install just would not work at all, but when Rhino is combined with decades’ worth of amazing custom tools developed by this community, plus Xnurbs, and maybe soon Cyberkstrak for what we do, it is better than any other tool at any price. Because we work so much on the front end of design first (lots of direct modeling + SubD -mostly from Blender) , and then we have this messy middle of the design process with tons of building and prototyping (parts for CNC,3D print, laser, fixturing, etc) a traditional MCAD tool just doesn’t work so well compared to a customized Rhino.
Funny side story: We are looking at OpenBOM to better manage our projects, releases, versioning and BOM. But it’s not cheap at $1000/yr/user (on top of our entire stack of subscriptions). So we have to decide if PeterTools is really not good enough at its unbeatable price
Even in projects where our end deliverable is a native SolidWorks assembly, unless it is a simplistic box, we do all our early iteration in Rhino and then take 1-3 days to rebuild it all natively in SW when we are done. This is much faster this way than dealing with MCAD tools, including NX, IMO.
However, I just today had to get two additional Mach 3 upgrades and it’s becoming hard to swallow even for us. So I actually steered one of our newest juniors to test Rhino (instead of Plasticity) and I don’t think my boss can afford to say no now so we’ll see how that goes (hope neither of them reads this). 
