It’s pity that Rhino 8 will be so limited in actual progress of its NURBS modeling and editing tools.
Here is a detailed topic with many suggestions about “Blend surface” and “Math surface” that are ignored for 5 years in a row by the “McNeel” team and still not implemented in the latest Rhino 8 WIP:
“Blend surface” lacks “Refine match” option similar to the one found in “Match surface”. Huge, huge, HUGE mistake.
“Blend surface” even can’t produce end handles that match the direction of the side walls of the input surface 1, 2 or both. Mega hyper ultra omega extreme flaw. This particular feature was requested by numerous Rhino users since the Rhino 3 times. However, 5 versions later it’s still a dream only…
Both, “Blend surface” and “Match surface” fail to match to a SINGLE isocurve direction of a trimmed surface edge, because they both lack a dedicated “U” and “V” options. Another MEGA HUGE unacceptable flaw. Here are a couple of examples:
“Blend surface” and “Match surface” both lack “Preserve flow” option:
No “Explicit control” to rebuild the output surface while still running “Blend surface”, “Match surface” and basically every major Rhino tool. For inspiration, look how Alias found a great working solution with its own “Explicit control”.
In many cases “Blend surface” performs far worse than “Loft” with followed by “Match surface”. Example:
Loft plus Match surface.3dm (7.4 MB)
Can’t match with G1 or G2 individual control points or a custom length of the surface edge without affecting the rest areas.
No “U” and “V” markings next to the edges of the modified surface:
There is no “Sweep 3 rails” tool.
While “X-nurbs” has many flaws, it’s still a nice patch tool that clearly shows how to improve Rhino’s own almost unusable “Patch” tool.
Converting surfaces into single-span Degree 5 with 6 control points results into a complete mess that’s hardly usable and basically forces the user to adjust all the control points manually. Something that Alias and other programs do automatically. This is an extreme weakness and literally stops people from modeling with single-span surfaces. Happens with other number of degree and control point count, too:
Lack of adjustable “Planar sections” option in “Blend surface”:
The blend factor is not updated properly while modifying History-enabled blend or matched surfaces:
Upon activating the “Surface fillet” or “Curve fillet” tools there must be temporarily shown the most recent radius values used in the current session that are clickable, so that the user could easily pick one of them for a brief moment instead of writing the value manually.
Lack of 3d dimensions:
Manual “hack” that I did to show how the Rhino developers could find the most appropriate way to built those automatically:
Advanced 3-D dimensions.3dm (272.8 KB)
Advanced 3-D dimensions (average normal).3dm (283.6 KB)
Below is a macro I created a while ago for adding 3d length dimension along a plane, but it still can’t produce real 3d dimensions between distant objects that have different orientation like the image above:
! _CPlane _Object _Multipause _DimAligned _CPlane _Undo
Here is another proposal that should work better than my macro:
Gumball lacks integrated “Drag strength” and “Move relative to view” handles:
Gumball also can’t reposition itself to be always visible in the viewport (extremely useful feature for close-ups while moving a large object or control points that are outside the visible portion of the viewport):
Lack of “Untrim normal to edge” option (normal to the trimmed edge):
Lack of static zebra and “Light lines”. This is quite strange, considering that Rhino is targeted to industrial design of any kind.
Lack of tool to calculate volume of closed object in LITERS, which is the most used type of liquid measurement in the World.
Lack of a native tool to calculate the mass of closed objects… Thankfully, I can use 3rd party plug-ins such as “SolidWeight” and “Peter’s tools”.
SolidWeight.rvb (3.5 KB)
PetersTools.rhp (136 KB)
Lack of dual tolerance option for “Split”, “Trim” and “Project curve”:
There must be an icon or a tick-box to quickly toggle the selection highlight. Extremely useful while working with dense 3d mesh models and point cloud data. The toggle must be visible all the time and the user must be able to switch it with a single mouse click, so the best locations is ether in the the Status bar at the bottom (next to “Filter”), or on the left side of the “Select all” icon, or on the right side of the “Properties” icon located below the Command line.
It will be even better to be able to apply the highlight toggle to a certain type of geometry, such like meshes only, while the rest ones will still take advantage of the default highlight.
There is no tool for Control point symmetry for NURBS surfaces!
We don’t have good tools for direct control point manipulation, as well…
The examples above are taken from some of my topics that could be found easily with the search engine. I can go on and on, but I think that you get the idea. Basically 95% of the important suggestions that me and other people here proposed over the years remain forgotten and will probably never see the light of the day. This is pity, because I LOVE RHINO and would like to see it become a far better and mature program than what’s it today. 