If you want to talk about surface continuity of n-sides, then we can appoint the command “Multiblend”, plug-in VSR shape modeling. Very useful in many cases, certainly more functional and powerful patches offered by Rhino. A Rhino is missing something, a serious shortage, I think.
I use Solid Works at work a lot and I use RHino at home a lot. I would say I am an intermediate user in each. I find Solid Works is much better when you are working with solids (surprise, surprise) and when you want to be able to quickly change your model simply by by adjusting dimensions in the underlying sketches. The ability to have all the geometry linked with relationships so it can all adapt to dimension changes is very powerful.
However, Solid Works can be extremely frustrating when working with surfaces. You just don’t seam to have the same control with surfaces that you can get with Rhino and the Grasshopper plugin.
No doubt there are ways of making Solid Works better at surfaces but if most of your work will be surfaces rather than solids then I would use Rhino but if you are working with solids and need to quickly create multiple configurations of solid parts then perhaps Solid Works is better, it certainly seems quicker on Solid Works to create some geometries.
Horses for courses! My favourite is Rhino + Grasshopper and I can’t wait to get Rhino5!.
A comparison of the software in question is not so much what is the best or most efficient. We started with a couple of clear examples: finding the best continuity between the surfaces, using the tools at the disposal of the various programs. SolidWorks is logical that works better on solids, but if SW did better Rhino using its tools surface then the question would change, it means that something does not work the second software.
We talked about “Patch”, for example, what is the best software that performs this command? ThinkDesisgn seems to me, then just, the conclusions are obvious. I’d like that even with the patch you Rhino came to the same result. Nothing more!
Needless to say, always the same comparisons between different software every CAD is designed for different uses and situations …
First of all, you don’t need that video or any of the examples to compare rhinos patch command. The manual, as well as the command dialogue clearly state, that the command is limited to adjusting tangency. If you want to compare precision of the solution, you should limit the other too to tangency as well.
Of course there are many reasons why a user would want to have G2 patches and rhino does lag in that field. But as Jim stated before, that’s basically a matter of workflow.
If in fact, you’d need curvature continuity, patching is the worst of several workflows. It just doesn’t give you any control and the result of matching the borders will always be some approximation. Strategies such as blend, sweep, or network surface are at least able to match the borders exactly. If you’d want to just rough out some 3d sketch and don’t care about control and precision, a surface or solid modeller is the wrong tool to begin with.
On the other hand plugins are part of McNeel’s strategy (as mentioned in some other thread). They give us a pretty powerful and extensible tool at a very low price. Add some plugins such as VSR or T-Splines and you have the functionality of other packages at a fraction of the price.Of course that’s becoming a pretty risky strategy with all good rhino plugin developers eventually bought up by Autodesk with drastically increasing prices and all…
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I would add to this “challenge” UGS NX software.
Take a look at this short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnbillOgCLo
How would you solve that connection? The patch gives a bad result. Using the plug-in VSR, I tried with “Multiblend” but the result is poor.
What do you think?
Thank you all.