Time is time money is money.
Maybe someone can point me to the person who spit out that qouted nonsens at first…sorry to be off topic.
Technically time is more valuable than money, especially when the fed has printed so much of it in the last few years.
The relativity here, has to do with the time users dedicate to the software they choose, over time.
If you don’t have any sense to connotate from such relativity of words, then the senselessness is probably relative to the beholder of such connotations.
The topic is usually about time, and time is not only money, but more valuable than money. Therefore, do you spend the next 10 yrs pretending Blender is worth your time, or knowing Rhino is worth your time.
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I can’t even imagine how I would start to use Blender for architectural design. It has such a tenuous grasp on important concepts like units and 2D orthographic drawing it’s fundamentally incompatible with how I think about designing and modelling buildings.
Like sure, I could go in there and drag faces around and sculpt something that’s building shaped but I’ll have to do so much more work to ensure that anything I’m doing actually makes sense. I’d basically have to go into the program with an already completed set of plans, elevations, and section details to have any chance of doing something more useful than a concept model. Where in Rhino I can think in 2D and 3D and switch seamlessly.
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Curios what is your experience with Blender, I don’t have much so I can’t imagine. I would assume it is not THAT limited.
I use it sometimes for organic form modelling, but mostly for easy texture mapping and rendering. I’m not a wizard in it by any means, but on its face it’s simply designed for artistic expression more than technical work. Almost all of the features it has in 2D are for freehand drawing.
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Basically it has no CAD drafting capabilities right? Yeah that kinda sucks.
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I’ve been watching videos on Blender’s architecture plugins. They work. But the process of making anything happen is quite unintuitive; basically a series of steps that you’d otherwise never be able to guess on your own. And with no ‘go-to’ learning manuals you’d have to make sure you have access to the video on how it’s done. For me, I absolutely hate having to scroll through a video to fill small knowledge gaps. And with YouTube trying to force ads on everyone now it’s next to impossible.
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Hi,
Blender is not geared for architecture. Blender has a few architecture plugins but once you see the demos you see how poorly they do it no firm could use that. There is a floor plan plugin that is great for blender users but could never be used in the industry. However their viz and speed of eevee rendering along with complex animation tools make it a great tool to have and/or to learn.
The problem is as Eugen rightly points out it’s not a curve to form program. Blender begins with the cube and though it has curve tools you don’t really build models with them. The curves are used more for animation and geometry nodes. Blender only just developed a proper move tool where you can actually snap to a vertex before you move an object. In terms of modeling floor plans etc. they are not in the running, but Blender knows that.
Problem with Rhino is it’s just too slow and lacks the tools that Revit has to get complex plans out. Though this can be done with Gh help and a person who only does this. In the long run it’s not really that great. Also VisualARQ holds promise. If you buy that it would extend Rhino’s architectural toolkit perhaps to actual usability for small projects?
But Rhino is unmatched for designing/inventing Architectural forms. Using Rhino’s advanced modeling coupled with GH, Honeybee, Karamba, Scan and Solve and Kangaroo, a serious person can break new ground and create real things that are not just about the form but also about how the model functions. I can’t believe no one mentioned Honeybee as it’s a valuable tool in itself and it’s free with Rhino!
Blender is worth my time. It’s an incredible work of art and it’s free but I wouldn’t give up Rhino one has to learn many softwares to stay competitive. Personally I have dropped out of the Autodesk ecosystem their products being expensive and slow. I now use these tools Rhino, 3dcoat, Unreal, Twinmotion, Blender, davinci resolve.
For small architectural projects Rhino is still a pain to get documentation out the door, but it copes well with the model, and using twinmotion I get great visualizations. And with Unreal using datasmith out of Rhino you can interact with your models. You don’t know how many mistakes you can catch when you can climb around in your model and move things virtually.
My only complaint is the developers don’t have a good plan as to how to propel rhino into the future. They seem to be a fragmented bunch with no leadership offering sometimes buggy poorly implemented tools.
They need a department to make better real 2d documentation.
They need to iron out their modeling tools like fillet surf and fillet which needs to be parametric at some point as well.
They need parametrics and better history and constraints
They need to fold Bongo and parts of Kangaroo into Rhino so that designers can move their creations to see how they work going hand in hand with constraints.
They need to implement voxel sculpting
They need to create a geometry type that is scene friendly like nanite in unreal or check out what Gaea is doing with height maps to make real time huge models a reality.
Rhino needs a fast rendering engine like eevee
RM
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Yeah, I’ve seen things like CADSketcher and BlenderBIM and all I can think is “It’s a nice start”. But it’s ultimately a bunch of mostly still unfinished features jammed into a piece of software that already has a billion unrelated features jammed into it. And tbh, the process of authoring an IFC model by mesh modelling each piece and painstakingly navigating the object menu to make sure it has the right class sounds like death to me.
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Architects are living creatures who are classified among a bigger group called AEC industry. Unless there is some adoption for Blender in this industry (Contractors, Fabricators Engineers) , I don’t see Blender being used or even considered by Architects, not in the next three decades.
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Exactly, it’s already difficult to invest too much effort into even Rhino for exactly this reason. The baseline drawing format in the wider industry is .dwg and despite how much I want to stop using ACAD, Rhino still doesn’t have a perfect conversion to that format.
I expect they need to hire a new generation of talented developers .
You can blame that squarely on Autodesk who make a maximum effort to keep their .dwg format as non-public as possible and change it every year. Contrast that with the McNeel OpenNurbs (.3dm) file format which is available to anyone to use.
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There is one unspoken fact. We don’t really know how much Rhino can be pushed into architecture field as many project must remain confidential. I have been working on 3 towers someplace in Europe where every bit of geometry was defined in Rhino. I have been working on super-duper cruise ship where body was designed using Rhino as well, and we can’t share it because of the confidentiality clause in contract.
If we had a public access to all Rhino project, I’m sure the galley would have been mind-blowing.
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wait what 
ikr
I’m really interested in ‘remeshing’ features, and voxels too if you can 
I agree, and I think Rhino is gaining momentum to be filling the niche. All we need is some good mesh alignment tools, or just maybe use meshlab 
but then I’d have to spend less time in Rhino…
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I’m also working on a super confidential project that has an adaptive reuse of a building from 1910, Rhino was great in generating useful geometry from 28gb of pointcloud files. so far so good.
Shining 3D and Einstar.
iRhino
I’ve also seen ‘scaniverse’ mentioned here by other users:
Also ‘spectre3D’ and ‘3D scanner’ are other apps that might have potential.
It’s probably been a few months since last time I checked, but the new LIDAR technology is likely leading to the spawning of more n’ more apps over time.
Just need a alignment solution. Maybe meshlab is the answer but I’m still procrastinating
ikr
Quite a few programs are able to work with Autodesk’s DWG format. It’s not that much of a secret.
Some of the conversion issues are things I can solve with AutoLISP (and a bit of a time). If I can solve it with AutoLISP Rhino should be able to do the same thing quite easily.
I’ve studied the DWG object model and there isn’t actually that much to it.
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My plan was to create a ‘base’ format and workflow for people wanting to model buildings in Rhino. I might get back on this once I familiarize myself with Rhino 8. My idea is that if people have a starting point/foundation, they can go further faster. That would bring in more people and more ideas.
I don’t understand why ppl even use those formats 
I want to start making stuff out of wood now just so I can prove it to be done without those formats
All we need is stl, igs, stp, and 3dm 