Thank you for appreciating that! We, as a community, share our experience with Rhino with the developers and that’s a great and natural way to improve it. 
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Great suggestion,
This options will save a lot of time.
+1 for me.
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In my former company, VSR was introduced as a budget replacement of ICEM Surf and Alias. And indeed there was high demand for it to lower the high costs of the CAD systems. By all the power VSR and Rhino had, my former company decided to keep their hundreds of licenses of ICEM and Alias and purchased only 5 more Rhino and VSR licenses. Why? Well, VSR was just a lightweight version of ICEM, and you could see that they simply forget to implement some vital features.
Apart from that, there were some minor issues with Rhino as the hosting application, such as the imprecise rendering and bad orientation if you model within a fraction of a millimeter, while loading a model of the size of a car. Or simply the fact of loading large amounts of data and other “minor” things.
Alias indeed was more the tool for the designers. The great advantage of Alias over Icem and Rhino was simply the much better history functionality, which allows a much quicker workflow within an early development/design stage. If you want to compete with Alias, you will also need to invest in these competitive features.
While last but not least, nobody should underestimate the effort in transforming people into another CAD software without a very good reason.
So no, Rhino itself will hardly ever replace ICEM and Alias. And sure there is simply no point with that, but as already pointed out by many. Modelling complex surface models is just too hard and way too time-consuming, due to the lack of good matching/blending and other basic surface functionality.
And I can only repeat that, also for professionals, there is so much stupid repetitive class A work to do, that automating some of this work with Grasshopper is something highly desired. Neither Catia, ICEM nor Alias truly support that. I have done thousands of stupid complex corner-blends manually, when modelling class-A ventilation grilles, I would not even give this stupid work to my worst enemy. So please, if McNeel implements new surfacing features, don’t forget to expose these tools over Rhinocommon. This way you’re really preventing people from dying because of doing too much dumb work!
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Tom, have you had a chance to look at Kajto?
I have a trial licence (hadN’t too much time to dive into it though)
It looks to me, like t-systems are trying to place this somewhere in the (vast) niche between Rhino and ICEM/Alias.
It is supposed to be fully parametric and they have grasshopper components to, I think.
I proposed to add this here: [History] - Feature requests: query edit & history visualiser
Explicit control and analysis tools in the modeling commands would be great workflow improvements!
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I can see the benefit of having analysis tools available at any point in the modelling process.
What I would love to see is a global “Analysis Manager”, with each button starting the respective Rhino command and the checkmarks toggling their visibility:
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It would be useful if a panel like that also had down arrows next to each item that would expand to give access the detailed controls/settings.
Also little things help like display being consistent within commands like MatchSrf. Maybe its just my issue but material changes within command and CP’s disappear even after being active before running the command. And I also have a similar issue with live updating with record history and seeing curvature combs from say an extracted isocurve changing in real time until after exiting the command. Zebra shader seems to work minus CP visibility but default material or curvature shader do not.
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I much prefer Rhino’s approach that let me choose which objects I want to include or exclude from the analysis. Also, Rhino has a dedicated custom meshing for the analysis mesh, which is a huge advantage. As far as I remember, one disturbing thing in VSR for Rhino 5 was the analysis applied to the geometry in the entire scene, which cause huge slowdown to me years ago due to the fact that the plug-in used the rendering mesh as a reference. So, it forced me to bump the rendering mesh to the sky in order to be able to see a good quality analysis shared for Zebra stripes and curvature analysis. Solidworks also has that huge disadvantage. In contrast, in Rhino I can set 100 different rendering mesh settings to 100 individual objects, as well as a custom analysis mesh.
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No, but I’ve been on the web-page. But there is not much of an explanation of what it actually does. Bad marketing? 
For me, this tool isn’t interesting, because I’m not working in exterior design anymore. And if there is a chance to do that again, I won’t definitely being that guy mapping patterns onto shapes all day long (especially in class-A quality). I always say, after doing 30 of these XXL cheese graters and noodle sieves, the job became so-so.
On one hand, doing the automation was extremely challenging and fun, but on the hand the majority of the work was almost zero rewarding, because of being on constant high pressure and lots of “can you move that part slightly left…”. Constant clashes with “design-managers” underestimating any work of any person on this planet, especially for the need of good tooling and long-term solutions. But sure, if you mentally still live in times of Louis XIV and you believe you are smarter than Albert Einstein but not being able to multiply two numbers, then it’s really difficult to see the bigger picture…
But yes, for anybody doing this sort of work, any surface tool which can be automated, is a very valuable thing to have…
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Yeah, this is all the more irritating as all the other VSR analyses can be applied to all OR specific objects and can be saved and managed independently.
It’s just the static light lines that doesn’t have these characteristics.
I guess this would have been updated in version 5… damn Autodesk.
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Lets punish “Autodesk” by making Rhino much better! 
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what a pleasure it would be!!
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To be honest with you guys, most of my hobby projects are done in Fusion360. Sorry to say this, but for the majority of work, this CAD solves it for me all much faster and easier than Rhino would do. And it’s free to use. By all the bashing on Autodesk, on some products they are pushing development quite aggressive. Same for Alias, there will be a turning point when they take over the lead over ICEM. And I remember hearing on an Autodesk conference the plan to expose the Alias Kernel to Dynamo at some point in the future. Basically, they are taking over the part, where Rhino was quite exceptional at. T-Splines as an example. Not saying that I like that one company dominates the market, but at some point we need to also see true innovation for Rhino. And maybe the aim should not only be to catch up with surface tools but to also develop some better tools as ICEM and Alias provide. A corner-blend generator could be such a thing, automatically creating 1 out of dozens types of blends! I could imagine many people just buying Rhino for such a feature.
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If all the renting propositions of Autodesk software were handled similarly to Fusion 360, I don’t think there would be much complaining.
You can have the mesh settings for the file in jagged, and use the object properties custom mesh for certain objects.
Yes, that is a workaround.
Still not very convenient.
Why not use the same system as with all other analyses? (I need a time machine to ask VSR)
Interestingly Kajto has exactly the same limitation in the way it handles static light lines…
I have a slight suspicion that there is some overlap in the group of developers - not a bad thing of course
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- I don’t understand your main point. Again, you’re suggesting that Rhinoceros should continue using its present substandard software.
- Based on your very ambiguous comments, I do not believe you are a Class-A modeler. Or, you may demonstrate Class-A by distributing its fundamental knowledge here.
- Also, tools alone cannot automatically attain Class-A quality. What a nonsense it is to merely discuss tools if you have not mastered the subject.
This topic is becoming very boring.
Another feature that is needed (and not yet mentioned in this thread, I guess) is to finally get numeric input in blendcurve for overall blend factor and ratios between different levels of controlpoints (depending on blend condition).
This has been requested multiple times in the past, let’s hope we’ll finally see this in version 8.
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totally agree - would be great to save those values to document-specific “blend-Styles” - and use same ratios for _blendCrv _blendSrf and _matchSrf and others
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