Yeah, I was thinking of alias surface which is 13000 Euro/year. I remember that just before Autod€$k switched to subscription only, the permanent license of Alias Design was 6000 Euro (I think surface was around twice as much, but I’m not sure). But you owned the software and could use it as long as you like… or at least as long as Autodesk maintained its suthorization servers…
The wonderful, convinient world of subscriptions.
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I just wonder, what would happen if one day the servers of “McNeel” (for whatever reason) stop existing? Will Rhino be able to run forever, with no servers? I already had one case in the past where my Rhino was unable to connect to the servers due to some strange error, hence it would not start.
set it up standalone locked to one machine and it’s yours forever and there is nothing we or anyone else could do about it.
But…we have no plans on going anywhere, selling out to anyone or doing anything but doing what we do so you can do what you do. Bob has built an amazingly stable company with a very deep roster of folks who care very deeply about it and we plan to stay that way long into the future.
Rhino just celebrated it’s 25th anniversary and I can say this with utmost confidence, we are just getting started.
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Funny story: We have one old laptop that still runs Rhino 5 and Tsplines; we treat it like a precious museum piece and only use it to make some SubD conversions. We know it’s a matter of time until Windows will just stop working. Windows installations self-destruct over time.
G
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Your assessment, especially the first part is absolutely correct. The biggest driver of all of this is the market dynamic and this is exactly the case when it comes to the current state of Alias and its past present and future development. There are a lot of things that I could go over, but first and fore most; Autodesk doesn’t so much develop software as they purchase and license software. Recouping and generating revenue on IP is a huge part of their business model…and this is why Alias has barely changed since the late 1990’s. They simply will not justify rolling development costs into a program with such a small user base, especially when OEM’s will continue to spend the money that they do on it. Alias is STILL BUILT ON A UNIX FRAMEWORK! This in and of itself is not necessarily bad, but in my humble opinion it is the reason that Alias has such troubling stability issues on modern version of windows. I seriously doubt that there have been any major updates of refactors to the base code since it was bought from Wavefront.
you can see the fingerprints of this all over Alias; redundant tools in various locations throughout the interface. The interface looks like is being rendered on a Sega Genisis. Shiping every year with a broken or depreciated tools. M saves doing very simple things. For some older Alias users this is fine…they don’t want it to change, and they certainly don’t want to change the way they have worked for 20 years, The younger users especially the ones coming out of school have very little love for Alias and I frequently hear from them about How it needs to be modernized.
There is a reskin to the interface coming in 2024 and the Beta looks good and refresh…however pretty much every aspect of the workflow and interface is the same, so i don’t know what’s going on under the hood. The rumors that I hear is that the devs that have been working on Alias at Autodesk for decades want to retire, and new younger devs don’t have the background in the Unix cade base and prefer more modern coding and development environments. So basically Autodesk’s hand is being forced to have to do a ground up rebuild of Alias at some point in my opinion.
This is getting longer than I would like, but to your earlier point, the userbase for this kind of work, and specifically the Alias userbase is teeny tiny in the grand scheme of things. Autodesk market hegemony is being threatened in at least two ways. While VFX, games and entertainment software probably only account for 10% of their total rev, Blender has made their big headway in those spaces. The Candence of development and the speed that Blender introduces new features has made the Autodesk subscription model for Maya, vred, and Max look like a very poor value proposition. One dude basically developed Plasticity on his own in two years and Alias has not had a major update in decades, and young sculptors notice that. There are plenty of things I do in Rhino every day at work that my colleges simply can not do in Alias, quite frankly.
There are a lot of great people that work at Autodesk and on Alias. But I do take issue with the business practices of the company at a higher level. They can be shady and anticompetitive. They are not built for innovating great tools, but for extracting revenue growth at a certain percentage every year for the stock price.
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Just bringing this post so that the developers of Rhino take notice and surprise us with similar tools in Rhino 8 or 9. 
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Until proven otherwise…
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I believe that developers are going after the needs of architects (of which I am one). Just look at the latest implementations of Rhino: a CAD increasingly aimed at architects.
Improving Blend, Fillet and Match srf is out of the question! Architects don’t need that much.
Personal impression…
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Sadly, this is also my observation. Rhino literally lacks proper tools for control point manipulation. “MoveUVN” is not enough, and the rest few ones are not as good as their counterparts in Alias and VSR.
Not to mention the lack of “Explicit control” option in the major NURBS surfacing tools.
“Patch” is left unchanged since two decades ago or even more… “xNURBS” is what “Patch” should have been in modern days.
“Blend surface” even can’t create a clean surface while using the simplest possible input surface with just 2x2 control points…
Blend surface must be fixed.3dm (276.3 KB)
The good news is that Rhino 28 looks promising.
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Bobi, you’re absolutely right!
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Alias has seen significant updates since 2019, when Speedform (T-Splines based) was discontinues in favour of Open Subdiv. That said, Grasshopper is much more powerful and responsive than dynamo and the core UX of Alias barely changed, but I’d love to see the new crowning features and Query Edit, amongst others in Rhino.
The new Elmo curve rebuilding is a step in the right direction, hope more will follow soon.
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HI There- does any one of you still ahev/ know where to get an old rhino5 installation/trial AND and old VSR installer/trial?
I would love to test it again and compare to the new cyberstrak project.
Can any of the “old” VSR users help?
Look here:
Anyone have an installer for Autodesk Shape Modeling Plug-in for Rhino? - Plug Ins - McNeel Forum
As far as I know Autodesk shut down the authorization servers for Shape Modeling licenses.
So you won’t be able to authorize “new” licenses, but should be able to install the plug-in and use an existing license.
I don’t know if you will be able to use the trial.
For more information see this Autodesk support page:
Autodesk T-Splines plug-in for Rhino licensing
For Rhino 5 look at this post by Wim:
My activated license lost its activated state somehow, and I haven’t been able to use it for over a year.
AD sent out an email a few years back saying that the servers that they use to validate the VSR installs (and other plugins of similar age) would be turned off shortly. After that date, it would no longer be possible to register the plugin if making a fresh installation. Consequently, the only remaining VSR installs are locked to the machine they are currently running on. When that PC dies or the OS is no longer supported by MS, then VSR dies with it. In effect, they signed its death warrant. I am amazed that they can legally do this. However, that’s what they did. And I’ll never touch an AD product again as a result.
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Yeah, that is my constant fear since Autodesk killed off the plug-in.
It was my understanding, that to install Shape Modeling authorization would be needed and therefore a new install of an existing license would be impossible.
But the Autodesk support page I cited above seems to suggest otherwise…
Granted it is worded quite ambigiously.
My SSD on my workstation went bad a couple of days ago.
I have all my files on a NAS so no problems from that perspective.
My main fear is that this SSD is the last system I installed Shape Modeling on, so I am now having it examined by a data restore professional to make a bootable clone of the system drive.
I still have my old workstation though and incredibly, after not using it for a couple of years, Rhino 5 with AD Shape Modeling is still working on it, so I will have a somewhat awkward solution if it will not run on my main computer anymore.
To be honest, I don’t think this is legal, at least not in the EU.
Good luck to anyone trying to sue Autodesk.
Apart from hardware failure, using Spinrite will keep your drives in best shape possible (both for recovery and maintenance).
It turns out that even SSD’s can be refreshed to some extent using Spinrite (Reads will slow down SSDs over time and Spinrite can restore much of the drive’s original speed).
Common OS and manufacturer’s algorithms for maintaining data integrity on drives doesn’t match Spinrite’s algorithms. It’s “magic” have for over two decades restored so many drives thought to have been irretrievably lost.
Unfortunately Spinrite doesn’t boot directly from UEFI systems (it was originally based on BIOS) but I got my SP 6.1 (recent update) running on my UEFI system from a image burnt to a CD-R drive (USB-stick should work for most modern system).
The legendary Steve Gibson (best known for his takes on security and privacy) is the guy developing Spinrite. In the next planned version (7.0) Spinrite will boot directly on any modern system.
But don’t wait until version 7.0, start preventing and even rescuing your old drives using Spinrite 6.1 already today. (Be aware of that large drives may take many hours or even days to scan with Spinrite’s more thorough algorithms, but you can stop the process, take note of the percentage, and restart from there next time you can let the machine do its magic (this week I scanned through several large drives during nighttime, stopping in the morning and restarting at from that same point at night).
A link to “everything Steve Gibson” on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Steve+Gibson
//Rolf
Example of a 4 TB mechanical drive which I interrupted yesterday morning at 58.6097% scanned (taking note of the percentage),
… and then I could restart the scan again in the evening so it could do its thing during the night hours until this morning… :
… which I interrupted again at 85.1318 % this morning, to be continued again later tonight. Aso.
Large drives takes forever to recover and to keep healthy. The algorithm examines every bit on the drives, and estimates its deterioration (there is a certain failure tolerance, which is recorded by the disks) and when the bit-rot gets into danger zone, Spinrite refreshes or moves the bit-chunks being at risk of irrecoverable bit-rot.
The analysis being done by the algoritms uses several dífferent approaches to recover data when discovering damaged areas, so if one algorithm can’t rescover the bits affected, another approach may succeed, aso. This is also why Spinrites algorithms can take “ages” to refresh or recover an old disk.
//Rolf