Virtual Mirror

Since most manufactured parts have bilateral symmetry it would be good to have a virtual mirror. This could be part of the surface checks (like Zebra Stripes, but click to see a quick mirror) or maybe part of the rendering enhancements. Either way a global mirror that goes sided to side or could be a reflection below a part for presentation purposes. It could be a layer modifier. Creo and Alias both have this functionality and it is very helpful. The mirrrored geometry could just be a reflection of the render mesh with no added nurbs geometry.

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Iā€™d like to echo this.

Went looking on the forum here and not many threads about it.

Seeing how Rhino handles clipping planes, perhaps virtual mirrors could be done the same?

In Alias, itā€™s just a button on each layer you can quickly toggle on and off (which is super useful).

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What do people using Rhino call this? There must be a different terminology that doesnā€™t show up in searches, because I canā€™t believe that nobody else wants this!

Iā€™m trying to sketch some lines on a very organic surface to figure out how a design works in 3D, and itā€™s agony to have to manually mirror each and every line!

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the Zebra command wonā€™t help?

You can set this up using Grasshopper. Use Geometry Pipeline to automatically get your sketched curves from a particular layer then mirror those curves in grasshopper. Whatever you sketch / edit / delete on that layer will then automatically get mirrored in realtime.

Hi -
FWIW, this feature request is on the list as RH-570, RH-1624, RH-2092, RH-7374, and
RH-26905 Mirror display
-wim

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Ideally, this would not only be a mirror display, but would include the possibility to enforce different levels of symmetric continuity: g0, g1/2 and g3 (and controlled blending over all controlpoints of the surface/curve)
At the moment this is just another reason why I depend on VSR.

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A virtual mirror is a must have feature to check the design intent of any product. I voted for this, too.
Mirrors were used on physical scale models since decades, especially in the vehicle design field. When I was kid I also used a mirror to check my half scale car models.

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Iā€™m sorry but what you describe is indeed ā€œnot onlyā€ a mirror display, and I hope everyone would agree that itā€™s outside of the scope of this thread. What you describe must be a different feature, as I at no point would want any of my surfaces altered in any way using a virtual mirror. A virtual mirror is just and aid for visual inspection!

It would, however be nice to be able to quickly match a surface perpendicular against the CPlane, but thatā€™s again outside of the scope of this thread.

But one important point to add here: Curvature combs and similar analytics should also display in the virtual mirror!

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+1 for a mirror display button.

I would add, that this function could activate all the geometry you have in session automatically (like clipping plane command).
In Catia, for example, is very time-consuming to select the geometry every time you want to check quickly, and even annoying if you want to keep this mirror display on, while you create new geometry, and you need to add it constantly.

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Yeah you are probably right, as your wish is more of a display function, whereas I was suggesting a modeling command,
I didnā€™t want to highjack your feature suggestion, sorry.

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If it would be only a display mirror IMO there should be some bake button to freeze it to the real model quick.

IMO it should support a whole layer of geometries and a folder which contains many layers.

I think that display only instead of modelling command should support a more heavy geometry stack inside. I think it may be a good idea but it would be super to have some bake button to convert that stack into real geometry hierarchy.

In Modo I have two options:

  • ā€˜merge meshesā€™ which is a dynamic meshop (node). This item may have linked many meshes, groups which contain meshes, and folder groups which also contain many meshes inside. I have a mirror operator there but I prefer set x scale to: -100% which works faster. It is possible to bake it to real geometry at any time;
  • instance (something like block) which is a dynamic linked copy of some mesh item. I give it a scale also ā€˜-100%ā€™ to have it mirrored. It is possible to bake it to the real geometry at any time;

Both things are fully dynamic.

When I have heavy scans on the scene in Modo then I import it as some kind of proxy item (Iā€™ve forgotten that type of equal command in Rhino - it was windows only). It works without loading geometry into the scene file. Then I create an instance of it (something like Rhino block and I set that scale to -100% on the X axis to have it mirrored). When I change the scan that mirrored version is also changing. Most important is that it consume not so much power from comp so the software works without heavy choking.

I`ve described here half-display versions of mirroring. There is no real geometry there but it is always possible to bake it or copy polygons from that to the normal layer.

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Any news about this new feature?

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RH-26905 Mirror display
ā†’ This item is open to the public.

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Is it going to be ready for Rhino 8 or will be left for Rhino 9 or Rhino 10? I noticed that the work on this feature request from 9 years ago was resheduled from Rhino 6 to Rhino 7 about 6 years ago, then from Rhino 7 to Rhino 8 about 2 years ago.

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