Rhino urgently needs these tools!

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. :slight_smile:

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you might be laughing, but to be fully fair we have network surface which does exactly this, and i guess you can get within tolerance usually, though with heavy geometry as a result, but i am not sure if it is that easy to produce light weight surfaces with so many parameters, and if it might be tricky to develop?

i found one plugin, i can not try it because i have no rhino on a windows machine.

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This is probably the least important among all the rest tools that I mentioned above. :slight_smile: But it’s still very much needed for product design. “Network surface” relies on a totally different approach with approximation of the input geometry that adds a huge amount of unnecessary control points and deviation that can’t compete with the clean results of “Sweep 2 rails”.

As for the tool you suggested, it’s “Sweep 1 rail” tool with advanced settings. The “Sweep 3 rails” tool should enable picking 3 rails (hence the name), where the middle rail adds an extra control over the overall shape.

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ic, i checked the web and i assumed that this might be doing something more advanced :smile:

sure, these wishes are pretty well known and well wished for the most part at least as far as i could discern. they can not be pointed out often enough for sure.

i completely agree, i also pointed that out either quite a few times already, the patch we have now is more than useless, its a waste of time :smiley: ok not fully i like to play with it from time to time. but again playing is all what its good for at most.

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Y’all are really labouring under the illusion that there exists some mathematically ideal solution to filling in random n-sides patches that some XNurbs-like tool will reveal. That’s bunk, the math doesn’t work like that, there IS NO SOLUTION, nothing will be anything but a mushy good-enough approximation. But, if you lay out your topology better most of these go away.

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I believe that the developers will think about implementing these functionalities at some point, because soon enough they will finally understand the importance of delivering robust NURBS surfacing and editing tools. :smiley: It may help if everyone of them is given the task to become a NURBS modeler for one day every week over the next year. They will suddenly feel all the inconvenience and lack of proper tools for doing anything other than a simple box. Just a suggestion.

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the main illusion is that hoping this will come true in our life time still.

i`d take that, if its better then the current patch.

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It will be interesting to read the opinion of several Rhino developers and what is their argument for deciding to not work in this direction, i.e. leaving those most important NURBS modeling and editing tools as underdeveloped and inconvenient as they are now. :slight_smile:

You can also make an internal contest between two teams of developers. The first team will use the current Rhino to recreate several target models, whereas the second team will use a prototype Rhino version that includes all the improvements proposed in my original post. :smiley: I’m pretty sure that team #1 will have a hard time achieving what team #2 could do 10 times quicker and with far less effort.

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Also, check post #322 and many others in the following topic:

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Many Rhino users are not aware of the ! _ExtrudeCrvAlongCrv command, because its icon is quite inappropriate and located far from the other main tools that use a similar approach. This is why, they struggle to accomplish the desired shape with ! _Sweep1 or ! _Sweep2. In my opinion, its icon must be located next to ! _Loft, ! _Sweep1 or ! _Sweep2, because the latter commands use both rail(s) and profile curve(s) to create curved surfaces. Also, the ! _ExtrudeCrvAlongCrv icon must include two white curves shaped like the letter “T”, in order to accentuate on the input geometry and the type of shapes it creates.

Download icon (32x32 pixels):
ExtrudeCrvAlongCrv 32x32 X.rar (1.9 KB)

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The Cyberstrak plugin now includes UV markers on the edited surfaces, yet, Rhino still lacks them… Check the 4:55 minute of the following video:

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sadly. bit of naivite is good or not?
:grinning:

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Maybe I’m confused. If you have a CV selected the UV directions are drawn. It’s subtle, sure, but they are there.

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Wow, I never noticed them before. Is it possible to make them more pronounced?

I’m aware of those tiny lines. However, they are not proper “U” and “V” markers with letters. :smiley:
There is no consistency in the UI, because the pop-up menus and Command line options (“MoveUVN” and others) show the U/V/N directions with their corresponding letters, whereas the surfaces inside the viewport are not marked the same way.

I can’t find any setting or advanced setting but maybe someone else knows of one

I don’t think they need the lettering in the view. Adding a U and V letter for every line coming from a CV would be really cluttered if you have several selected. I do agree they could be more pronounced. I think it’s consistent in that they use the X and Y colors to correspond to U and V. Adding arrowheads and thickening them could alleviate a lot of this.

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That would be very helpful.

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I opened a bug for it here. If there’s more good ideas I’ll add them to the issue.

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If you take a look at my proposal, it’s about adding just one letter “U” and one letter “V” near the two corresponding surface edges of the surface. Note that this is not a substitute to the existing coloured line markings. It’s a request to add two additional letter markers to the edges of the currently edited surface(s). Check my image below.

This particular image was also posted in another topic much earlier, but I can’t find it now. It was part of another request to combine “Rebuild surface” and “Rebuild surface UV”, where the TAB key would switch the directions between U, V or UV (both), hence the additional text at the bottom of the image.

The same approach with “U” and “V” letters next to the surface edges was used in the recent Cyberstrack plug-in and it works perfectly fine, giving the user an immediate information about either direction.

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