Just for simplification sake, let’s say there are about 100 type of users that own and use Rhino in some matter. Each of them believes that the one thing they do all day with Rhino (a 1/100th of the use cases/user-base) thinks that the other 99 users also use Rhino for similar reasons and have similar expectations. I used to think that way but them more I see Rhino being used by others the more I realize than no single niche is that important. The lack of commercial success of TSplines, VSR, Clayoo, Power-whatever… might be a clear proof of that.
If you read some of my other post I’m a big user and proponent of SubDs for advanced surfacing and that they could make the techiques more accessible to more users than any other tool at any price. But I also think that the nerdy-way of pushing a cube to form it into a rubber ducky is not the way to go.
I think is a bold step, a long-haul play that probably only McNeel could pull off. But then who knows, they are the ones that haven’t been able to pull off a decent out-of-the-box viz/rendering solution for well over a 15 years and counting of trying. So we’ll see.
Near-term solutions like the VRS stuff is quite nice and useful for a global addressable market of let’s say 2-3K Rhino users worldwide? My guess is their sales where more like 300 seats max. My guess is that Michael wasn’t planning to make money with a super niche plugin, but rather ship it as a proof of concept to appeal to Autodesk, Dassault, Siemens’s vanity. But this is only nice stuff as in ‘nice turd polishing tools’. They even have a whole set of tools, half of them, to ‘analyze’ turds. Just so you can know with accuracy, with data, and colors, and curvature graphs, how shitty your shitty patches are.
Yeah definitely. But look at it on the positive side: if they stayed focused on ID tools they would probably have gone out of business by now, like any other software company trying to make a living in such a small niche like ours.
I was told (from someone on the inside) that Autodesk was already licensing Michael’s technology for Alias. The acquisition of the company was the next natural progression. I’m sure hanging onto the company for the sake of a few hundred Rhino users didn’t make the least bit of sense from a business standpoint. We all would have done the same thing, I’m sure.
Sure, depth is a legit business strategy. A big tent covering professional product designers, expoloritory architects, small business owners, as well as hobbyists, etc., is smart and likely sustaining. Nothing is mutually exclusive. Got to hit the nut somehow.
However, from where is legitimacy derived? And what constitutes such?
In ways from: Relevancy, competency, comprehensiveness, and professional praise from those at the highest levels. Rest trickles down, especially when perceived as delivering “more (or enough) for less.”
Whether one buys into such or not (and yes, there is a ‘machine’ at work here), legitimacy stems from stuff like this:
(BTW, I did figure out that you can chain edges on just one side by NOT clicking on chain edges (since chain edges picks all edges available), but rather shift-clicking the chain.
Can’t you even trim down and shrink the surrounding surfaces so we just have enough data to make the surface?
You can even change the scale a bit, and we wouldn’t have a clue about what it is
First of all, you are not going to get a good surface to fill that space in Rhino because the edges of the existing surfaces are so badly out of tolerance. Look at the edge and vertex tolerances reported in object property>details (or run What command).
If you rebuild the edges on these surfaces and then try to join them you will find they don’t even come close to joining. You are asking to build a surface where at one of the corners that surface will have to match to 2 surfaces that are .05mm apart and your tolerance is set to .001mm. That’s obviously never going to work.
The best way to look at this is you have 2 relatively simple shapes and you want a smooth transition between them. The best way to set that up is something like this: transition.3dm (100.3 KB)
I agree with Jim, it is impossible to get a good surface there because of the nature of those surfaces and their edges.
That said… NetworkSrf should support chained edges like BlendSrf does, and also have sliders like BlendSrf for all four edges to adjust the Curvature blend distance. (That said, it would still not produce a good enough surface for this scenario)
BlendSrf does a nice job consider the input, but there is no way to control the blend edge and NetworkSrf default settings are not good enough to handle the different curvature. It’s great for lots of things but needs some more options.
