SubD is a convenient and wick way to create furniture, too (including car seats). Not to mention that it could vastly improve the prototype portion of a project, because it allows for easy modification of the conceptual shape (like what Alias car designers often do) before proceeding with creating the final model with the usual NURBS tools.
Having each discipline in a nice, easily describable silo is quite the traditionalist view…
I know formally trained industrial designers who are footwear designers, work on vintage aircraft and others that have moved into the field of bespoke jewellery. Likewise, I also know architects who are now in the movie/CGI area. My point is software should not be viewed in such a narrow fashion. Sure, it may have originally been intended for a particular industry but things change over time. If Rhino had better surfacing tools that allowed users to manipulate surfaces in better/easier ways, I’m sure everyone would benefit.
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My understanding is widespread use of Rhino by architects is relatively recent. I recently read on this forum that many of the early users were naval architects / boat designers, and Rhino is still widely used in the design of boats.
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Alright, off my Saturday beer buzz, and asking myself – how do I add to this important conversation without writing another similar dissertation???
I’d say this then: In a perfect world, I agree with and promote most of the salient points expressed already, and even a couple of the contradictory ones. The specifics likely matter not at this stage. Give me modeling tools or give me death!
Huh? Look…
Rhino started as: Modeling tools for Designers
But wait, it evolved (as it should)…
OK…more…you dig! (yes) AND the first two tags remain - DESIGN, MODEL. Cool! (…and it doesn’t even say Generate(ive)???)
But without design and model, what have you got? Squat! - Jack S@#$! - Nada! (insert app/company you think sucks here)
So it’s really simple, right? Just buy-out XNurbs guy, MOI guy, and reverse VSR - awesome/done! (sarcasm) HA!
Had hoped v7 would be the ‘modeling update’…and… well, IT IS (SubD - the Rhino way) plus some other ‘stuff,’ plus a unified cross-platform code base - necessary evil IMO (I digress - Mac haters twitch here) AND some rendering…some day, maybe, for me. Progress! Little company / big progress
SOOOO, v8… what’s left but the BIG NURBS modeling update, right…cool…everyone (all 37 of us 
???) sing kumbaya!
Hey, Rhino is first and foremost a design/model tool, right? ID is first and foremost about designing and modeling… duh? (I don’t care about other verticals, sorry, but it is fine if you do.) No brainer! Get 'er done. And if straight-up buying/reversing is a pipe-dream, then all-hands-on-deck, please, for a best effort focused on what - all those guys up the thread there - say/said. (plus the in-house ‘designers’ on the dev team)
After all, what if Daddy Warbucks gets his $!@# together one day and decides to play the Big Bad Wolf (because some CEO wants a few more points of share for his options) and sticks VSR into FU-360, plus a few Alias tidbits to seal the deal, seeking to stick-a-fork in that pesky Rhinocerotidae. (I know - you “from my cold dead hand” guys, your knuckles are turning white, I get it.).
Would Warbucks actually try??? Perhaps he gets around to it, but get a load of this:
Nine votes…9 sinkin’ votes. Not 69 or 99 or 399…NINE. HA! (ut-oh, some clerk tagged it - ‘future consideration’… 
)
Seemingly, their user base doesn’t give a rat’s arse - VS-what? Here is what they (seem to) care about based on vote count - hint, dark mode is way up there.
Here is my simplistic pitch: v8 - the counterintuitive, counterculture, back to basics, uber NURBS (and more SubD) MODELING UPDATE. Designers and modelers of the world take notice and rejoice!!! (however many there are)
We can have a dream.
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The problem is not the technology, its the loss of them. Maybe the conditions are just really bad?!
You could also push quality 3rd party development, if there would be a marketplace for tools. I for myself started to implement bezier surface tools years ago. I quit very early. Its just unrealistic to create software in in freetime, and fulltime has little perspective.
The effort in making even a small revenue is minimum of equal size as developing the tool . Especially if you see that all the awesome plugins had economical problems. If you guys complain about having done bad marketing, then I would ask what would you have done better? This could be a full time job alone, and of course software devs are usually not the right guys for this… You cannot compare to Autodesk or other bigger companies, because they have teams only doing this kind of work.
Until this does not improve, the problems will remain…
With regards to the marketing, for example the one for the VSR plug-in. They would be much more successful with 20 more videos that show various cases where the capabilities of its tools shine. If you check their YouTube channel, they have a very limited amount of videos that showcase just a portion of their tools. YouTube is a huge (and free!) platform for advertising and I’m surprised that they didn’t took the opportunity to make people aware of why they should consider buying the VSR plug-in.
Another major reason for the lack of orders was the initial price at which the VSR plug-in was sold. In EU it cost 1 400 Euros plus VAT (usually 20-26% depending on the country). That price made it too expensive for most Rhino users. In the USA it was $1 325, which is lower, but still more than the price of Rhino itself. It was not before them being acquired by “Autodesk” before the price dropped to 392 Euros + 20-26% VAT in EU or $371 in USA.
The VSR plug-in would be much more popular at a price of 300 Euros, and with at least 20 more deep-dive videos on YouTube. Once they had their plug-in spread across many customers, the most natural business strategy would be to offer series of annual upgrades with expanded functionality at an affordable price, such like 100 Euros or so. I know that software development is not easy, nor its fast, but as some smart people say, sometimes less is more. Offering a product of any kind with proper balance between market price and value is a vital decision in every industry.
just on a side note, no not that free, it takes time to watch videos, and when time gets additionally compromised by a gazillion of adds all few minutes, time runs out even faster. but to be fair i think a user can actually set if youtube is allowed to show adds, so yes in that case its ok.
I haven’t seen any advertising on YouTube for years, because I use the “Enhancer for YouTube” add-on for Mozilla Firefox. 
Along with that, I don’t see 99% of the ads on the other websites, because I also use the “uBlock Origin” add-on. 
Internet is soooo much easier and beautiful without disturbing ads. Also, the browser works faster this way and consumes less RAM and CPU power.
As for the YouTube itself, every owner of a YT channel has the option to turn off monetization and ads for the videos he or she uploads (sometimes, Google may decide to put ads on its own).
I think that everyone who is interested in seeing the capabilities of such a valuable plug-in like VSR could wait a minute for the advertising to expire.
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If you need half the time to release a plugin, the price will be lower. And if you create tools like VSR, you need more than a Youtube series. Bytheway, they had showcase videos. But my experience had been, that many unexperienced modeller, did not even understand the point for choosing Bezier. So if you want to do marketing right, you need to create a lot more descriptive content.
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NO i cant 
yes i also have ublock, does a wors job than wipr which worked splendid till they started charging for it. still have nothing for my ipad those adds drive me nuts and biscuits.
one thing skimming through and sorry if missed it in case somebody already talked about it, patch is actually not so bad. it has continuity and other issues but if that would be enhanced it could become a really great tool. after all Xnurbs is nothing more than trimmed surface either if am not mistaken. i would certainly love a native tool like that in rhino.
If one refuses to spend a minute to watch the capabilities of a plug-in like VSR (and eventually buy it after seeing its advanced and time-saving feature), and completely ignores it instead, then maybe he or she prefers to spend extra minutes or even hours every day for tedious NURBS modeling without VSR. It’s all about the personal choice.
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Its chicken vs egg. Imagine being a modeller not knowing class A, no Alias, no Icem. You would need to explain a lot more to show the benefit of such tools. You can see this in so many Grasshoppper threads in this forum. When user don’t know how to surface model… just saying. Anyway I get your point, and things could have been made much better. But someone should also see the side of the developer and how hard it is to actually create a commercial software. Many logical decisions are simply not logic if you are on the other side of the table.
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wow, ok that was completely besides my point. nevermind 
Make Rhino’s patch great again.
Aww, this thread also got derailed… 
now we’re never getting an answer to this.
I see parallels with Xnurbs/VSR and David Rutten. This is the most honest (and brutal) truth about Rhino on this forum, imo:
Grasshopper didn’t become a 3rd party plugin that was acquired by someone else and gave Rhino a decade of relevance, but now everyone has copied it and it no longer has the power it had before. Seems McNeel was betting that SubD (and not VSR) would be their next big thing to make it relevant for another decade, but that tech is apparently so simple that everyone already has their competing products released before McNeel even got theirs out the door!
Btw, since there’s only product designers in this thread, have you guys heard of Rhinogold? I just saw this on their website:
No, that’s not the price. That’s the discount. Guys, VSR was too cheap! 
you are around long enough to know that this is the common way things are here
and by the way i noticed that you are are often right there when its about creating extra heat and pressure, questioning McNeels capability for a foresighted development. i just wonder why you need to prove that so much.
If you look up my name on the Autodesk, Blender and Unreal forums, you’ll see that I’m no different over there. It’s called feedback. I want all my tools to be better. No tool is perfect, and if you stand still, you’ll get left in the dust.
Honestly, one of the things I completely don’t get, is critique of critique…
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i completely agree on progress.
when you smash a basketball against the wall it might just jump back at you without ever bouncing into that basket, i am sure that is not the kind of progressive feedback you are aiming for.
If that was aimed at me, well, I’m not aiming at a wall I am aiming at a basket. My question is, why did someone put a wall in front of that basket? 
I’m sensing a derailment again…
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This was exactly my experience when I started using VSR - I was just starting to understand different workflows and such. I bought VSR not because I understood it, but I just really could sense that it was going to be part of my next step. I was lucky that I could afford it and bought it - and did the $371 upgrade when Autodesk was selling it. I told SO MANY people - hey, even if you don’t understand this thing, buy it right now. Don’t think I convinced a single person! But back to the point - I never once found the VSR videos helpful in explaining WHY their tools were so amazing or useful - they were sorta like “here’s the blend command, it makes blends” - where I was at with my modeling at that point, the “why” was not obvious to me. Many people thought that VSR was somehow just a repackaging of standard Rhino commands - almost like a scam, where they were selling you basic Rhino commands through a new UI - of course we know this is not true. Anyway - when I say that VSR did a terrible job of marketing this is part of what I mean - they didn’t grasp that the vast majority of the Rhino userbase didn’t have experience with Alias or ICEM, and so there needed to be education around workflow. Man I had so much coffee I dunno where I’m going with this anymore…
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Haha, same here. I knew a little about the Alias workflow from watching YouTube videos and like Sky got the sense that VSR brought some of that workflow to Rhino. The VSR videos did convince me to make the purchase, so from that perspective, they were at least somewhat effective. But I agree, I don’t believe they did a good job as to why this would be beneficial. (Which by the way is not easy)
This brings up a whole different topic though. Aside from maybe a handful of Alias/Icem users, the entire CAD industry is built around the curves in surfaces out model. And I will be the first to admit this is still a very large part of my personal workflow. I started modeling in Pro-E and SolidWorks (Curves in/Surfaces out). It took me several years before I added Rhino, and for many, many years I continued with curves in/surfaces out.
Only after I started to make an effort to have untrimmed single-span primary surfaces did I start to sculpt after surface creation. It’s actually such a foreign workflow to me, that even to this day I struggle with it, but I’m making progress.
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