Here is just a small thought:
I am not an app programmer, but I can imagine that actually developing a very good feeling hand sketching functionality comparable with established dedicated sketching apps on the market can be a big task (witness how few of all the sketching app offerings “get the feel right”).
Rather than focussing on such a new development from scratch it may be more feasible to develop a Rhino for Mac plugin to directly support established sketching app data first and coming up with a well rounded expanded Rhino iOS later.
I am looking especially at Concepts app here, as to me from all the more advanced sketching apps it allows for the highest performance currently (both in feel and accuracy of the sketching and in its features towards more technical applications rather then the generally “artsy” approach of most offerings).
Concepts also already allows for the most extensive I/O in file formats and has all iOS <-> OS X file transmission options already established and working stable.
A Concepts - Rhino plugin would be something I would love to pay money for if it supports layers, accurate curves and some flexibility re. plugin settings (to assure best quality data to work with).
This could be a stop gap solution to bring iPad sketching capability to Rhino for Mac and it could be very, very useful even if an expanded Rhino for iOS is in the future.
Yes, that might also work - and would perhaps be easier (?). The plug-in should need to identify and automatically ‘convert’ a line to degree 1 and an arc or a spline to degree 3, 5 or 7. Perhaps we also should have the possibility to change the degree of a spline ‘on the fly.’
Edit: Whatever the solution would be (sketching in iRhino or sketching in Concepts + plug-in) it have to work with both platforms - Mac and Win.
Dave here from the Concepts team. We will look at improving our DXF support here. And also happy to talk with someone on the Rhino team if there is something we can do to make workflows simpler.
Can somebody post a dxf from Concepts?
Something simple, like that example at the top of this thread, so I can see what’s in there and make sure we’re not messing it up when we read it?
Thanks,
Lowell
Welcome @David_Brittain! I’ll take a look at Concepts ASAP. Sounds awesome from what I hear.
We’d be thrilled if you supported 3dm natively and I think your users would be happy too. Our native file format, openNURBS (3dm), is open-source and - we think - easy to work with. We have .xcodeproj files included in the toolkit if you are developing in Xcode so that building the library should be simple. We also have .NET wrappers if you are developing using .NET/Mono. All these tools are free and royalty free - so is help over in the Rhino Developer category.
Hey - Thanks for sending the file.
It contains polylines with pretty coarse tessellation - Just what it looked like in the example at the start of the thread.
Maybe everybody knew that already. I just wanted to make sure it didn’t happen somewhere in Rhino
Our studio has also been pursuing the Concepts/OSX Rhino workflow, and have been in touch with Concepts about the export issues already, so having seen this thread I thought I’d chime in here as well. We have been liking Concepts and as Rhino is already good at file import we felt the ball was in Concept’s court to get useable geometry out- we support any collaboration that may occur, as we are actively seeking the best workflow between the iPad Pro and Rhino for Mac, and concepts is the strongest contender so far.
Our recent release improved the export of curves with higher resolution poly-lines than before. We are working on some changes for one of our next major releases that will allow us to export curves.
I appreciate the work done.
I believe that the only satisfactory way (for me) is currently to use the “Concepts” curves in Rhino, and to export them to PDF Vector (paid option). An example I think makes the idea.
That would be heaven!