I was trying to get to the VSR forum, but the VirtualShape.com website has been down for at least a few weeks. Today it redirects to a generic AutoDesk page. There is no VSR forum on the AutoDesk site. Anyone know what is going on?
Not promising from their “Expert elite” guy on the general discussion forum/
'Another one bites the dust!"
Although it looks one can still purchase it in the AutoDesk store.
These plugins for Import/Export for .wire files is interesting.
http://www.digital-sculptors.com/cms/index.php/software/rhino-3d-plugins/52-exportalias-plugin.html
wow… didn’t realize vsr was that expensive.
This was the generic page:
I know of the other link, but it lacks sublinks to forums, beach buggy tut, etc.
Hmmm. Not good. Not surprising, but not good.
A cynic might say that it was a cunning ploy by AutoDesk: buy out a good plugin for a competitor product, raid the biscuit tin of the tasty bits to add to your own product; meanwhile, sell the plugin for the competitor’s software at a knockdown price (which AutoDesk did for quite a while earlier this year) so that users get to like the feature set. Then withdraw support and upgrades and wait for the competitor (aka Rhino) to bring out the next release (aka V6), which you can bet won’t be able to run the V5 version of VSR. One guess where all those orphaned users are going to go…
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Exactly - then rinse and repeat with the T-Splines plug-in.
It could get worse. If V6 doesn’t offer enough benefit to convince users to upgrade (because they’d lose the use of their useful plugins if they do so) then they will stay with V5. McNeel score an own goal. 
I had hoped that AutoScourge had changed their ways. More cunning stunts!
I’m still glad I got VSR and T-Splines at the early adopter prices well before AD got to them.
If TSplines doesn’t work in V6, none of the jewelers move to V6. There are a lot of jewelers.
I m not convinced by the recent comments . People , I believe , will stick to Rhino, maybe keep V5 and upgrade to V6 alongside. That s what I would do. The time, money and effort to relearn a whole new software isn t worth it IMO. Also people are fully capable to surface a car or make jewelry before VSR and TSplines came along. I do not believe these plug ins are earth shattering but rather nice to have. Let s give the Rhino programmers the benefit of the doubt to demonstrate their creativity and resourcefulness also.
Also our input will help them . So we all need to chip in. Maybe have some general contest for programmersfrom around the world to build a function exclusively for Rhino or whatever.
Why jump to conclusions so fast ?
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Speaking for jewelers, they won’t jump ship to another software package. They will stick with Rhino, but they also won’t leave leave TSplines. If it doesn’t work in V6, they just won’t upgrade.
The majority of the jewelry plugins are written for Rhino. TSplines also give jewelers (who are not highly technical modelers) the ability to create organic shapes that are difficult to achieve in NURBS.
I would love for the Rhino devs to incorporate TSplines and VSR functionality into native Rhino, but I don’t think that’s even on the table.
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Yes, I think this would be very important (VRS-type functionality in native Rhino) and should IMHO be (one of) the next step(s) for V6. After what’s happened with Virtual Shape (and T-spline) I would never spend my money on a plug-in that brings important functionality to Rhino - just to, perhaps, be taken away next year… I would feel very insecure…
Philip
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That is a nice little story, and I myself am as sceptic as anyone about Autodesk’s acquisitions and am a disappointed shape modeling user too (disappointed about the lack of future development that is, the plugin is fantastic).
But the truth is a little more complex than that:
VSR have been developers for Autodesk long before they even sold any Rhino plugins.
So Autodesk can truthfully state that they have just integrated a long standing external developer to their team.
That said, the fact that this has effectively eliminated a cheaper (but admittedly less capable) alternative for their Alias line of products, which apart from Alias Design are extremely expensive, surely has been a “welcomed side effect”.
Norbert
By the way:
Why is everybody assuming that the plugin will not work in Rhino V6?
Norbert
All plug-ins that are not pure .NET (and this includes VSR) need to be re-compiled to work in V6. Therefore, you cannot use the plug-in that you now have in V6, the maker has to create a version that will work in V6 (only). The question is whether they will provide such a version of the plug-in. I certainly hope so for all the users out there that would be stuck on V5 otherwise.
A full-fat version of Rhino that included the functionality of VSR Shape, T Splines and Solvespace would have been a fantastic tool. Even at twice the current Rhino cover price, it would have easily undercut the parametric solid-modeller competition and I could have felt very smug knowing that I’d got a superior product to all the others in their model-tree misery. With the exception perhaps (ahem) to their ability to produce linked 2D files…
This all sounds as though I’m beating Rhino up, big time. I love it dearly. It’s been my main design tool since 1999 and intend for that to continue.
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McNeel shouldn’t be afraid of “Sherlocking” VSR, it would benefit a lot of Rhino users and VSR people made a bunch of money from the Adesk acquisition.
Hi Menno,
Honest question, so please don’t take this the wrong way:
Are you sure about this, or are you just guessing?
After all, the jump from rhino4 to 5 didn’t make all 4.0 plugins incompatible (apart from the obvious 32/64bit issue).
Or where those plugins (the 4.0 ones that work with rhino 5) all “based on pure .NET” ?
And, if you are right, could McNeel help with some kind of “compatibility mode”, that would run vers. 5 plugins?
Again, I am quite (almost completely) ignorant on the technicalities, so please forgive me if these are stupid questions…
Cheers, Norbert
From V4-V5 some plug-ins were compatible 32bit - 64bit because they were written in .net., but not many. Most had to be recompiled for 64 bit.
However, it was promised that the SDK - what McNeel provides developers to program with - would not change between V4 and V5, so that V4 plug-ins could (at least theoretically) run in Rhino V5 32 bit. This caused a lot of problems, because it meant that McNeel could not change core Rhino in a lot of areas without breaking the SDK (and thus their promise), so many things that needed to change were put off for V6.
With V6, the SDK will be broken to allow such changes to be made. Rhino needs to go forward. Thus, pretty much everything will need to be re-adapted/recompiled. How third party developers will respond to this is up to them…
–Mitch
(edited for more clarity)
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