Currently, Rhino is in something like a NURBS-crisis. Alias made a huge progress in the past 20 years, unlike Rhino’s main NURBS surfacing and control point editing tools that are nearly unchanged since Rhino 2 (with a few minor exceptions). The last few versions of Rhino focused more on non-NURBS stuff, such like tools for Sub-D, 3d meshes, ShrinkWrap etc. While these are nice additions, the NURBS tools are left in the corner.
Both, “Blend surface” and “Match surface” lack a huge amount of functionality that other CAD programs have.
Detailed suggestions and examples were posted by many users on this forum in the past years. Here is one from 6 years ago:
“Match surface” can’t match while preserving the overall flow of the control points (matching the 3rd row of control points only in the normal direction).
“Match surface” does not have a “Keep side edges” option to prevent unwanted movement of the two adjacent edges of the matched surface. This means that activating that particular option will force Rhino to keep the end control points at either side of the matched edge. A sub-option will let the user choose if the program will keep the position or the tangency of the side edges while matching the edge in-between.
“Match surface” lacks a “Blending” option (also known as “Influence” in some CAD programs) to smooth out the overall shape.
“Blend surface” and “Match surface” lack individual U or V target direction.
“Match surface” lacks ability to match smoothly to the side edges of the target surface(s), so that the resulting side edges of the matched surface will have at least tangency continuity with the side edges of the target surface(s). The same goes for “Blend surface”, too.
There is no “Project match” option in “Match surface”. Look at Alias for inspiration. This is a very powerful option. It can also project match to multiple target surfaces while also offers “Explicit control” option. Rhino only has a rarely usable “OnSurface” option which changes the entire matched surface edge while dragging one of its control points and fails to keep the rest of the edge intact. It also can’t match to multiple target surfaces.
There is no “Explicit control” option (something like an internal surface rebuild) in the primary surfacing tools, including “Match surface” and “Blend surface”. This is a huuuuge miss for Rhino. HUGE. The developers much focus on this one first.
Related to the above. There is no “Refine” option for “Blend surface”, similar to what is used on “Match surface”. The “Refine” option is an easy way to create a different structure of the blend surface. Its advantages are already known from the “Match surface”.
Converting surfaces into single-span degree 5 surfaces results into an ugly and unusable output surface with heavily chaotic orientation of the control points.
There is no proper “Relax” tool to make the selected control points of a surface relaxed along the UV coordinates to preserve the overall shape (not to be confused with the “Smooth” tool which flattens the surface while trying to relax it).
The “Edge continuity” tool can’t show two or more analysis dots on a single edge. It’s limited to only one dot per edge.
The “Edge continuity” tool can’t show tangency and distance analysis between a target surface and a matched surface that used the “OnSurface” option.
Rhino also lacks proper control point editing tools with tiny arrow handles (not to be confused with Gumball). Activating those arrow handles should automatically hide the Gumball, and vice versa. This is extremely well done in Alias and it saves a lot of time. Rhino’s drag modes are difficult to use and often result into unwanted moving in the wrong directions.
There is no static Zebra and Light lines with manual control for the orientation of the stripes.
There are no U and V markers when working with surfaces with shown control points, or while modifying surfaces, or while extracting isocurves. Even those simple things are missing from the latest Rhino after decades of development.
Extracting isocurves from different types of objects activate different default directions.
The “Patch” tool is nearly useless. xNURBS is what the “Patch” should have been if it was given a proper development.
The “Select by name” panel always resets to a every inconvenient small size upon each opening, which is annoying to expand manually every time (like 100 or 1000 times per day).
While “Smooth dragging” is active, Rhino will not let me use “Snappy dragging” either with the right-mouse button or after hovering for 3 seconds over Gumball’s arrow handle. This is a very simple solution that I proposed long time ago that could make the use of Gumball so much more convenient.
There is no Super Gumball with optional (meaning that they could be turned off if some user does not need them) integrated handles for Drag strength accessible at any time. Mega huge miss! It could save a lot of time and frustration.
“Offset” will not remember the last used values in a list for a quick picking, hence the user is forced to manually write the value every time when it must be changed. Other tools could take advantage of this functionality, too. Even Gumball could use a list of last used values (also reversing the value from positive to negative and vice versa) to add more convenience to the Rhino user.
There is no “Sweep 3 rails” tool. It’s a much needed tool for sure.
Upon activating the “Surface fillet” or “Curve fillet” tools there must be a temporary HUD with a vertical list consisting the most recent radius values used in the current session. These values of the HUD must be clickable, so that the user could easily pick one of them for a brief moment instead of writing the value manually. The HUD hides when the command is either complete or cancelled. The user could choose how many values will be displayed on the vertical list (either from the Rhino options or a tiny gear icon next to the upper right corner of the first value shown in the HUD), with the default value being 10.
The list is endless. Focus on the main NURBS surfacing tools, control point editing, Gumball with Drag strength handles, “Explicit control” option, etc. Look at the VSR plug-in for inspiration, too.