I was considering Vectorworks precisely for that reason as well…but it’s much pricier and nowhere near the “user friendliness” of Rhino…much less self-explanatory and a bit awkward to use…they’re taking too much account of their legacy workflow much of their older customer user base is accustomed to…So I’ve gone with Rhino…
I think people at McNeel are not nearly aware of the market potential of Rhino, as this discussion clearly shows.
It’s also a wrong question to ask about particular improvements.What is really needed, is a more systemic approach to a complete vector “creative suite”, with possible connection to some bitmap program. Perhaps they should start a new development team for that.
Now, if that is available on Linux, I’ll get rid of Windows right away…
Hi siemen,
You might try to use SVG to import 2d paths from Rhino to Affinity.
That seems to work pretty well for me (I have no experience with files containing typograhie in this scenario through).
If this doesn’t do the trick I would use a converter (e.g. reaconverter, quite cheap and works well) to convert your dxf to illustrator file format and then open it in Affinity designer.
Hope that helps, Norbert
you can currently use the arrowhead command to add an arrowhead to any curve.
+1 for transparent hatches, and easier linetypes!
Also, a WYSIWYG viewport toggle! ArchiCAD has this.
Best
Eugen
Have you tried inkscape for drawing and krita for painting? Thanks
The ability to create a BOM
One functionality that would also be nice is supporting the use of font managers. I have a library of fonts that i use https://fontba.se/ to manage. When activating fonts they become available in other applications i.e. illustrator, but not in Rhino. This might be a simple fix, might not be, but it sure would be nice.
I would understand implementing AutoCAD’s 2d drawing functionality in Rhnio, but CorelDraw, Illustrator. I think Rhino will lose it’s face.
Rhino is an engineering tool is it not?
Yes it has rendering and mesh modeling for CGI but it is an Engineering tool it uses metric and imperial units and not pixels.
I’d leave someone to develop a plugin to implement presentations and brochures not as a part of the core OOTB Rhinoceros functions.
The only thing I use Illustrator for in vector drawing is gradient, transparent hatch and image trace. Rhino is much more precise and user friendly than illustrator. It is a headache and not always reliable to work between illustrator and rhino. If it were possible to develop transparent and gradient hatch that would be a big + for architects and draftsman like me ~ my five cents
Why did you leave this out of your last sentence? Seems to me that an awful lot of folks would be delighted to have this built right in to Rhino for reverse engineering from photos, etc.
There is a plugin for Rhino 6 called Trace which does a better job than Illustrator.
No, I would say not. That is to say not exclusively. Rhino is a design tool*. There are many areas of design that could benefit from the things mentioned like gradient hatches, especially those that depend on 2D print or screen graphics to transmit information or illustrate something.
- I perhaps sould say that the origin of Rhino was a design tool and still is it’s base, but these days it looks more like a computational base for anything concerning 2D and 3D geometry (I’m not describing it very well here, but you get the idea)
There are Gradient and Transparent Hatches in the Rhino 7 Work in Progress version. GO the the Gradient Hatch post to find out more. We included transparency also.
Just saw the Youtube presentation of the Grasshopper component for visualising Hatches. Kind of useless until won’t be added an input to trigger the bake command from an external source. I don’t see myself right-clicking and pressing the bake button a few hundred times just because it is missing an input that can be easily added to this nodes.
Hi - I’m probably missing something, but which of the native Grasshopper components has an input for baking? How would the Hatch component be any different?
-wim
I recently started working on something that kind of copies what Affinity does as shown in my example above:
It’s not finished yet and a lot of extra features I’m thinking of could still be implement but it already makes my life easier when working with different linetypes.
this would really be great.
I have tinkered with custom display modes and made some that I use specifically for 2D exporting. Rhino is actually not that far away from beeing very capable in 2D exporting.
What I’m hoping for:
- a simple way to adjust the line thickness in the viewport, per layer for example
- fills for curves, not via hatches
- draw order per layer, not having to do that with
BringToFrontorSendToBack
Especially the last one is really important.
It’s possible this has been posted somewhere, but I’ve been digging for a couple of days and haven’t found it… to answer @bobmcneel’s question from more than a year ago, my “top 3 things” missing from rhino are really just one thing: 2D vector output from layouts, in useful formats, without having to go through the Make2D process.
My team regularly makes detailed shop drawings, and we currently have a cobbled-together process of Make2D and Illustrator to get geometry from Rhino into a legible, clean format. A big part of that is control over line weight and color, and ideally transparency. For example, profile “outline” curves of a shape in a heavy weight, internal joinery curves in a lighter weight, hidden lines dashed or semi-transparent.
To be able to fully skip the jump to Illustrator, I’d need:
- a better “PrintDisplay,” one that fully reflects what will be output to PDF, rather than loose approximations that change based on monitor resolution
- true vector output of everything but fully rendered viewports to PDF (though that would be cool), so clients can zoom in on drawings without staring at a pile of raster pixel garbage
- better control over “silhouette” and “intersection” lines – as it is now, two nested objects will have individual “silhouettes,” which isn’t so helpful for drawing. And the “silhouette” lines do strange things to interior curves (see image attached).
- control over specifics of PDF output – currently, the workaround is to go through “print to Adobe PDF,” but it’d be great to be able to control things like scale, compression, rasterization, image downsampling etc.
Happy to clarify if any of this is unclear – I do think this stuff would be a really welcome addition to Rhino, without turning into an illustration program!
I’m interested in knowing more about what you need. I guess I would break the problem into 4 parts
-
Creating the right set of curves and annotation objects
-
Getting the right attributes on the curves, Line weight, color, line type, etc.
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Outputting to PDF with the right controls.
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User Interface to make this happen. Does this happen with Print command where the line type customizations are specified like Display options, or does the user have to run something like Make2d, with object selection, view selection, line attribute configurations part of the command. Then run Export to PDF where output configurations are detailed
A user might be most interested in solving the last problem. However, I’m more interested in the first two, before we design the UI, or tune up the PDF writing, we need to be able to compute the right curves with the right attributes.
The code to do hidden line drawing is the Make2d code. So that is what I’d like to use for this. You mentioned issues with silhouettes, intersections and “outline curves”. I’d like to see examples of all of these issues.
Are the Make2d results reliable enough, fast enough for your applications? Again I’d like to see some examples.